Enhancing availability of learning resources on organic agriculture and agroecology

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe the provision of existing learning object repositories with enhanced forms of describing digital resources on organic agriculture and agroecology. Design/methodology/approach - The approach followed was to investigate non-invasive techniques for semantic annotation of learning objects, for which use was made of two tools. The first tool was a software application for the automated classification of learning resources stored in public learning object repositories. The second tool was an ontology in OWL derived from the knowledge in the Agrovoc thesaurus. Findings - Current digital repositories for educational resources and open access archives provide scholars with a number of features, such as the ability to search for materials according to given criteria, or to retrieve the full content of those materials from the repository. Many provide advanced features as well, such as browsing, assessing and collaboratively peer reviewing learning resources, but at the cost of using the specific tools and interfaces provided by each repository. Research limitations/implications - This research is part of the EU-funded project Organic.Edunet, aimed at facilitating access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to organic agriculture and agroecology (OA&AE). Consequently, knowledge representation, thesauri and the educational resources reported herein are deliberately focused on the OA&AE domain, even though the concepts and techniques utilized may be easily applied in other contexts. Originality/value - The paper describes two new approaches aimed at enhancing availability of learning resources: the potential use of ontologies for the description of learning resources, and the full use of the classification category in the IEEE LOM metadata standard.