A New Architecture for Cross-Repository Creation and Sharing of Educational Resources

Abstract

A large amount of educational resources are currently available in the Internet, covering educational needs for many school grades. However, using such wealth of material, typically dispersed in several repositories, in a simple and effective way, is rather challenging due to the difficulties encountered by teachers in learning the peculiar access and operational procedures that each repository system requires. Therefore, it is important to provide the teachers with a centralized, integrated, simple system that can address most of their needs so that every operation (search, edit, share, download) can be done from a single location. This work follows this direction by designing and presenting both an architecture to integrate different repository systems using the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API and an integration layer that provides a simple web interface suitable for the needs of both the content creators (teachers) and the users of the contents (learners). Results have been evaluated both quantitatively, i.e., using performance indicators such as response time, and qualitatively, on the basis of the user experience evaluated through a questionnaire. Both type of results show that the platform adequately addresses user needs therefore it has the potential to be embraced by a large user community.