Agrega, federated access to educational content

Acronym of the case:

Agrega

Web address of the case:

http://www.proyectoagrega.es

Country of the case:

Spain

City/region:

Spain

Posting Date:

30 April 2009

Last Edited Date:

24 May 2009

Author:

Manuel Canabal (red.es)

education | interoperabilty | oer

Type of initiative

Project or service
Strategic initiative

Case Abstract

In 2006 a series of measures were developed in the area of Spanish community Education whose purpose is:

a)To define a standard of digital educational content package

b) To generate a core group of digital learning objects, in some cases based on existing content, which serve to promote the technological environment created and

c) To create a technological environment that will house content which adheres to the aforementioned standard, and which is accessible to the educational community under different modes of use.

In order to meet this latter objective a federation of digital repositories, called Agrega has been created with nodes installed in each one of Spain's Autonomous Regions. Each node enables the storage of SCORM 2004 learning objects labeled with LOM-ES metadata (application profile of the LOM metadata specification), and the performance of a set of relevant operations in accordance with the profile defined by the user, such as search, display and the creation of new material.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Services for Citizens | Infrastructure | Interoperability | Regional and Local

Sector

Education, Science and Research

Start date - End date

October 2006 (Ongoing)

Date operational

July 2008

Target Users

Citizen | Civil society

Target Users Description

Mainly:

Teachers
Students

Also involved:

Families

Scope

International | National

Status

Operation

Language(s)

English | Spanish

Other

Catalan, euskera, galician, valencian

Policy Context and Legal Framework

Avanza Plan 2006-2010
The Avanza Plan 2006-2010 for the development of the Information Society and convergence with Europe and between Autonomous Communities and Autonomous Cities (hereinafter 'Avanza Plan'), approved by the Council of Ministers on 4 November, 2005, falls within the strategic points of the National Reforms Program designed by the Government to comply with the Lisbon Strategy. In particular, the Avanza Plan is integrated in the strategic programme of R+D+i (Research+Development+innovation) which the Government started through the Ingenio 2010 Programme.

The Avanza Plan is based on five main performance areas:

Home and Citizen Inclusion: the biggest challenge in this area is to make citizens participate in order to enjoy the advantages of using the Internet and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The measures used in this process guarantee the inclusion of all categories of citizens, providing easy access and spreading relevant services of the new technology aiming to improve the quality of life, the Â information and the participation of citizens in their community.
Competitiveness and Innovation: this performance area includes the measures for promoting ICT sector development in Spain and small and medium-sized enterprises adopting Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Education in the Digital Age: seeks to incorporate ICT in the educational process and integrate all of the agents that participate in the latter.
Digital Public Services: achieve the implementation of Â fully developed Electronic Administration is a key aim of the Avanza Plan. The achievement of this goal directly influences the rest of the Plan's goals.
Digital Context: the existence of Â secure broadband infrastructure, of digital identity infrastructure and the availability of a suitable content offer on the network are the elements which establish the new digital context, as they are essential catalysts for the Information Society's development

The Avanza Plan (www.planavanza.es) aims at achieving suitable ICT use in order to contribute to the success of an economic growth model based on the increase of competitiveness and production, the promotion of social and regional equality, and the improvement of citizen well-being and quality of life.

The Internet in the Classroom programme has been designed and developed in relation to the area 'Education in the Digital Age'.

Internet in the Classroom

Among the actions included in the Classroom Internet Program, Red.es, together with the Spanish Ministry of Education (ME), Industry, Tourism and Trade (MITYC) and the ACs, are developing actions with the purpose of supporting Information and Communication Technology (ITC) integration into Education by Â financing educational centers with non-university general system and special system public funds, as well as academic staff training centres and higher level academic and pedagogic Â schools.

A major part within the Internet in the Classroom programme actions is dedicated to the creation of new educational content. These actions are in order to provide teaching support materials as an education tool and to use the ICT. With this goal, different actions have been adopted to accommodate education centres in their production and use of materials from various sources and conditions and licenses of use.

Agrega is a project born in the wider context of the Internet in the Clasroom Programme.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Content provision

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Mainly (or only) open standards | Open source software

Funding source

Public funding EU | Public funding national

Project size

Implementation: €5,000,000-10,000,000

Implementation and Management Approach

Implementation and management approach

Consensus, common project of different public administrations
Release every 4 months functionality to gather feedback
Involve teachers in the project

Key components and success factors

Clear roadmap of functionality
Technology its important but the main objective its to populate and share digital educational content among teachers and education administrations

Technology solution

Agrega is a federation of digital repositories of digital educational content which can be accessed without a specific knowledge of the structure or organization of the repository. For interoperability purposes in Agrega these set of standards have been selected:

IMS DRI (IMS Digital Repository Interoperability). The framework defines relevant functions like Search/Expose, Gather/Expose, Submit/Store, Request/Deliver The goal of this specification is to enable widespread access to content in repositories of both types in the context of e-learning by applications such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS), and Search Portals (e.g., in library search systems)
OAI-PMH Protocol for Metadata Harvesting which provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. There are two classes of participants in the OAI-PMH framework:
- Data Providers administer systems that support the OAI-PMH as a means of exposing metadata; and
- Service Providers use metadata harvested via the OAI-PMH as a basis for building value-added services.

SQI (Simple Query Interface) is an Application Program Interface (API) for querying learning objects repositories. Since one major design objective is to keep the specification simple and easy to implement, the interface is labelled Simple Query Interface (SQI).
- SQI is neutral in terms of results format and query languages: The repositories connecting via SQI can be of highly heterogeneous nature: therefore, SQI makes no assumptions about the query language or results format.
- SQI supports Synchronous and Asynchronous Queries in order to allow application of the SQI specification in heterogeneous use cases.
- SQI supports, both, a stateful and a stateless implementation.
- SQI is based on a session management concept in order to separate authentication issues from query management.
RSS - RSS (formally "RDF Site Summary", known colloquially as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. In Agrega every single object in the repository is exposed via different RSS
PURL - Id-MEC-CCAA: every single object in Agrega has a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client can then complete the URL transaction in the normal fashion.

Agrega is build out of open source software products. The Agrega software platform consists of:

Application - Agrega it is three tier architecture built in J2EE using well known frameworks as Struts, Spring, Hibernate, and Castor for assuring application independency from application servers and databases.
Web services - SOAP web services are built with Apache AXIS
Search Engine - Learning Object metadata is indexed with Lucene for efficiency purposes. As Agrega is a federation of nodes, search response has to be as fast as possible in order for the requesting node to present de search results
Learning objects Storage - Learning objects contents are stored in a file system uncompressed as SCORM 2004 objects. This allows to serve the content directly form the web server
System help - All documentation and system help is maintained with Mediawiki

Every application software module exposes SOA services to the other application software module. By this way it's easy to integrate third party applications, or easily escalate horizontally or vertically the architect

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

With Agrega, teachers and students can:

Search a vast repository of certified curricular content
Access from a standard browser to every learning object existing in the repository

With Agrega, teachers and education community can:

Create new content in a consistent way,
Compose, package, reuse already existing content,
Do a quick publication of curricular certified content.

Track record of sharing

Agrega implementation information can be found at Cenatic forge: http://agrega.cenatic.es/

Agrega has won the Silver Award in 2009 IMS Learning Impact Awards http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr090514.html

Agrega source code has been shared with UK.

UK is funding the National Digital Resources Bank (NDRB), a repository of adaptable, re-useable educational resources shared under a Creative Commons licence. The repository is to be hosted on an open source platform. To host the repository the NDRB will use Agrega, software developed for a similar project and funded by the Spanish government. Agrega is licensed under the EUPL (European Union Public License).

References:

http://www.red.es/notas-prensa/articles/id/3078/espana-cede-reino-unido-software-la-plataforma-contenidos-digitales-educativos-agrega.html

http://www.unblogenred.es/espana-exporta-su-sistema-de-contenidos-digitales-educativos-al-reino-unido/

http://www.osor.eu/news/uk-ministry-funds-repository-for-open-educational-material

Lessons learnt

Content quality and reusability it is a must in education,
Proper tools and guidelines have to be established,
Don't stop, just keep with your funcionality roadmap and gather feedback during the process,
Involve teachers and experts through the process,
Listen to the project partners always.

Multimedia Content Select a Tab

There isn't any image for this case

There isn't any Video for this case