Some months back Scott Leslie invited me to pitch in on a Learning Object Repository comparison study he was putting together for the Western Cooperative on Educational Telecommunications (WCET) and Edutools.
I had never done anything quite like it before, and frankly had my doubts whether I would be able to carry my weight. But Scott was a patient and very helpful guide, and it ended up being a tremendous learning experience. I can’t overstate how much I benefited from his assistance. The discussions we had on what constituted an appropriate feature set were provocative and most useful. I was prompted to dive into technical documentation that under normal circumstances I would avoid like oral surgery, and had the chance to try out systems that approached the issue of handling media in quite distinct ways. Working with the vendors was also enlightening on a number of levels. It was easily the equivalent of taking a thorough course on LOR use, frameworks and specs — assuming such a thing existed.
Scott has announced the public release of the report today on his weblog, co-authored by Russ Poulin and Bruce Landon… They were generous to give me a co-author credit as well, my role was more as researcher, and I had relatively little to do with the organization and composition of the final report.
The docs:
http://edutools.info/lor/final_report.doc and
http://edutools.info/lor/final_reviews.xls
Thanks to all concerned for a great experience. Hopefuly others will find this work useful to them.
