interoperation of COSE VLE with e-resources
Staffordshire University worked with Ebrary and Emerald Group Publishing to make their external e-resources searchable from within the COSE VLE in the same way as local content.
Summary
ICE focused on the interoperability between Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and the online systems of publishers and aggregators. Staffordshire University has developed a free web-based VLE called COSE which is widely used for e-learning in the UK and internationally. Teachers developing e-learning materials want to use external resources like e-books and e-journals as well as internal resources created within the institution. The aim of the project was to integrate the searching of external resources into the COSE VLE so that this content could then be used within the VLE in the same way as local content.
Staffordshire collaborated on the project with Ebrary, an e-book supplier and aggregator and Emerald Group Publishing, an e-journal publisher. It has agreements with both to use their electronic resources for e-learning.
The project successfully enabled the searching of Ebrary and Emerald e-resources from within the COSE VLE via its standard Search Tools interface. Users (teachers or students) formulate queries with the Search Tools and pass them to Ebrary and/or Emerald. The links and associated metadata can then be saved as ‘reusable referenced objects’, a new class of content within the VLE. This referenced (external) content can then be reused along side local content in learning materials. The project successfully integrated COSE with RELOAD, the metadata and content packaging editor, to enable reuse of reference objects through a metadata description based on UK LOM Core.
Outcomes
Staffordshire
University
is continuing to develop COSE and explore interoperability issues. Recent projects have included:
Outputs
Report
The project’s final report (PDF) to JISC explains how the COSE search feature was integrated with Ebrary and Emerald and the metadata framework. It includes the application profile for the reusable reference objects based on UK LOM Core. The final report is also available from the COSE web site (click on ‘Reports and Papers’ and go to the section on ‘From the Staffordshire ICE Project’).
Further Information