POOL , POND and SPLASH : A Canadian Infrastructure for Learning Object Repositories

The Portal for Online Objects in Learning (POOL) Project is a consortium of several educational, private and public sector organizations to develop an infrastructure for learning object repositories. In this paper we address the issues of building such architectures including the metadata, software and hardware considerations and bootstrapping the system with initial content. We also describe the tools we have developed, some of which are available for download to help set up similar infrastructures elsewhere and to connect is to POOL. The main advantage of our solution is that it can potentially embrace all nature of individuals and organizations involved in the learning object economy.