SREB Digital Learning Content

The Digital Learning Content Initiative was created to identify guidelines and develop recommendations to assist those who develop, evaluate, select, acquire and use digital learning content. Interest in the initiative grew out of concerns about the difficulty of moving learning content between hardware and software environments. This led to the formation of the Digital Learning Content Working Committee within the Educational Technology Cooperative, which pursued the problem vigorously.  The resources below are related to their work.

Technical Guidelines for Digital Learning Content

The Technical Guidelines for Digital Learning Content  is the committee's resulting product. The 20 suggested guidelines identify the minimum technical requirements for digital learning content. While not directly addressing instructional quality, they encourage the development of all content to the same standards, thus enabling selection of content based on quality rather than on accessibility, technical interoperability, or compatibility with a specific application (such as a Learning Management System).

SREB Digital Learning Content Toolbox — Accessibility, Portability, Usability

The SREB Digital Learning Content ToolBox provides policy and technical digital content resources for schools, colleges and state education agencies. The resources are organized into two topical areas: accessibility and portability/usability. Accessibility addresses Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act and related disability issues. Portability/usability relates to the migration of digital content to student learning materials, including e-courses.

SCORE — Sharable Content Object Repositories for Education

This goal of the SREB - SCORE Initiative is to improve the quality of digital learning course content (learning objects and tools), to improve teaching and learning, and to achieve costs savings. SCORE was conceived to help state educational agencies, colleges, universities an schools work together to create and share quality digital learning course content through the use of federated state repositories.

Principles of Effective Learning Objects

The purpose of this publication, Principles of Effective Learning Objects, is to define learning objects in the context of the SCORE  — Sharable Content Objects Repository for Education initiative, identify expectations for SCORE participants’ use of learning objects and provide evaluation criteria of effective learning objects. Each school, college, university or state education agency that seeks to provide digital resources to SCORE will be asked to ensure that they comply with these principles.