ABSTRACT
Digital repositories are built on database technology, but seek to go beyond simple warehousing to provide mechanisms to encourage the discovery, exchange and reuse of learning objects (LOs). This chapter describes the evolution of POOL (Portal for Online Objects in Learning), a consortium project of the TeleLearning Research Network National Centre of Excellence, and chronicles the lessons learned in our efforts to build a LO repository scalable to the national level. Funded in part by the CANARIE Learning Program, POOL has contributed to the development of two enabling technologies: ‘POOL, POND and SPLASH’, a distributed architecture for a peer-to-peer network of variously sized LO repositories.
