Access to distributed learning material: the EASEL solution Available to Purchase

This paper starts with an overview of why and how online learning material is being reused. This sets the context for a detailed description of EASEL (Educator Access to Services in the Electronic Landscape, http://www.fdgroup.com/easel). This European project is directed towards technological solutions for the reuse and sharing of teaching and learning materials available online. In doing so EASEL deploys emerging open international standards for educational metadata and develops some original approaches to ‘content packaging), course construction tools and cross metadata searching through a Z39.50 and an XML/RDF search gateway.