Agrega
The Agrega project (Agrega is the Spanish word for "add") is a federation of learning Digital repository which is to be used by 19 educational authorities in Spain. Each educational authority will have its own repository loaded with curricular learning objects created according to standards, and each single repository will be able to integrate and interoperate with other learning systems locally and worldwide.
Objectives
The project objectives are to:
- Promote, unify and establish a common cataloguing, packaging and publishing standard of Spanish education community learning objects
- Create a technological reference framework where learning objects can be ubiquitous accessed under different models of utilization
- Generate a common procedure and establish the best practices to create digital learning objects from standards
History
In order to create a sustainable learning federation the following principles have been followed as:
- Generate a federation of interoperable Spanish educational repositories instead of a single central repository
- Promote openness to repository interoperability using whenever it is possible well-known standards. Agrega is based in digital repositories standards like IMS DRI, SQI, RSS and OAI-PMH and digital objects standards as SCORM for object packaging and IMS SS for object sequencing and LOM-ES Spanish profile for metadata (which is based on Learning object metadata).
- Use whenever is possible, standards and open source tools with a dynamic and active and steadily growing community. Agrega is being developed with well known open source tools.
- Develop a service oriented architecture (SOA) and promote a technical architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among heterogeneous interacting software agents.
The Agrega project has a clear focus on integration and interoperability between Agrega learning repositories and the rest of the world. Moreover, it is open to collaborative evolution based on a generic GPL licensing. It is the first step towards providing a nation-wide access to content generated by the education community in a consistent and interoperable way.
Curricular content for Agrega is being developed under Creative commons licensing schemes, can be experimented directly from a web site, offline or by an LMS, and all the contents and application will be localised in Spanish, Euskera, Catalan, Valencian, Gallego and English.
Benefits
With Agrega, teachers and students are able to:
- Search a vast repository of certified curricular content
- Access from a standard browser every learning object existing in the repository
- Share content with other teachers and students
With Agrega, teachers and education community are able to:
- Create new content in a consistent way
- Compose, package, reuse already existing content
- Do a quick publication of curricular certified content
Further information
The information website is currently located at <http://www.proyectoagrega.es>.
Acknowledgement
Agrega project partners are: Red.es (public entrepreneurial entity attached to the Ministry of Industry), the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Education and the Spanish Autonomous Communities of Spain.