The Everlasting Dawn of Educational Brokers - A Search for Key Design Principles

In the last couple of years we have evidenced several initiatives promoting the vision of open educational systems. Educational brokers are supposed to take advantage of this ‘infrastructure of standards and open specifications’ and provide exchange services for users and systems. However, a quick assessment of the adoption of educational brokers leads to the conclusion that educational brokers have still not managed to integrate themselves successfully into the educational landscape. Based on an action research methodology we derive and discuss three design principles that – once implemented – shall lead to an effective brokerage infrastructure. Based on the action research undertaken in two separate research projects we conclude that an effective educational broker needs to: (1) provide a balanced metadata model for learning resource descriptions, (2) take advantage of interoperable ‘home systems’ that provide services from the user’s most frequently used access point, (3) report on who is re-using what in case ‘open content’ is brokered. 1 From Standards to Educational Brokers In the last couple of years we have evidenced several initiatives promoting the vision of open educational systems. Standardized data formats for describing learning objects (e.g. IEEE LOM, IMS Metadata, IMS Content Packaging) and open, component-based frameworks for learning resources (e.g. AICC, SCORM, OKI) shall ultimately lead to an improved interchangeability of learning resources. Educational brokers are supposed to take advantage of this “infrastructure of standards and open specifications” and provide exchange services for users and systems. Educational brokers – from a technical point of view also referred to as educational mediators [11] – enable their users to reuse and compile distributed units Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange