As I’ve previously noted in this space, it finally seems as if a substantial quantity of learning objects are now available to instructors. And though the existing collections have never looked so good, I am still not able to point people in the UBC community to one or two distinct pages where they can quickly and comprehensively survey what’s out there. (The best I’ve been able to do is create a set of links to recommended resources.)
To this end, there are some promising developments on the horizon. MERLOT demoed its federated search framework at the recent conference in Vancouver. D’Arcy Norman and colleagues have tested a working fedsearch demo for the pending release of APOLLO, including a nifty Sherlock channel. And last week I was introduced to the SPLASH project’s latest wrinkle… a federated search framework of its own.
The developers behind SPLASH and APOLLO are collaborating on the eduSource communication layer to link partner repositories, and hopefully this work will lay the foundation for the streamlined search processes that will be needed if LOs are to take hold with mainstream users.
