The SE@M'08 workshop will be held on September 17, 2008 in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'08), Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Registration at http://ectel08.org/registration.
Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are "hidden" in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange, GLOBE, CORDRA) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources.
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging learning content.