1. Introduction

The Calibrate project aims to address some of the issues, which have been left unresolved from a previous project, the CELEBRATE Project. Based on extensive collaborative work including Ministries of Education, 319 schools, and 775 teachers, it was possible to extract the following features:

• Teachers are interested in using new types of standards’-based learning resources commonly referred to as Learning Objects (LOs).

• Given simple, user-friendly authoring tools, teachers who are experienced with ICT are capable of developing high-quality learning resources.

• Ministries of Education are interested in supporting national teams of teacher-developers in order to quickly develop a critical mass of ‘open content’

However, even though the majority of CELEBRATE teachers were proficient in using ICT tools and technologies, most of them were still only at the early stage of using single, standalone LOs in blended learning situations. Few teachers, even those with access to virtual learning environments, had the instructional strategies, technical skills, tools and time to combine LOs into longer online courses or to fully exploit their potential for more advanced forms of collaborative learning (McCormick?, 2003).

For these reasons, the Calibrate project partially aims to develop a common platform for both creating and reusing LOs. This platform, described as a "Learning Toolbox", intends to provide teachers in Europe not only with the ability to co-construct Learning Objects, but also to provide mechanisms for retrieving, reusing and repurposing content material and pedagogy.

The IEEE defines "Learning Objects" as being "any entity, digital or non-digital that can be used or re-used or referenced during technology supported learning". This definition is currently being debated because it claims that any object is also a learning object. However, in the Calibrate project, a new approach could be to define a "Learning Object" as an object only used in an educational context. It is out of scope of this report to define what a Learning Object is because we are merely here interested in IMS Learning Design and "Units of Learning".

The notion of co-constructing Learning Objects for teachers can be supported by an online community space, thus enabling them to work collaboratively on similar items, to share ideas and practices, and also to browse other participants' contributions. With the notion of retrieving, reusing and repurposing, teachers can extract partial or entire existing content material (text, image, video, links, etc) for direct use, or to be applied to a new context.

However, the rather novel approach with the toolbox and the project as a whole is that the teachers should be able to reuse pedagogical methods as well. This recurring issue has been present in the research field of educational technology for the last couple of years (Koper, 2003) and what remains to be resolved is whether teachers are actually able to export a particular pedagogical "approach" (e.g. how the course module or online event has been organised) and reuse it in course modules, which might be in a different subject domain with different content material. The way of abstracting the pedagogy from an online course is still something that is challenging. Pedagogy includes the notion of structuring learning/teaching activities (processes) in a in a course. Today's Virtual Learning Environments do not attempt to support such features, as they are more oriented towards content and user management, rather than activities' or processes' workflow. One of the important challenges that the toolbox faces is to be able to abstract the activities attached to a learning event so that they can be extracted and reused by teachers.

An important contribution, which could address this limitation, is the development of IMS Learning Design (IMS LD). One of the basic aims of IMS LD is to enable the abstraction of different learning design approaches into a meta-language that will represent and allow the interchange of practically any learning scenario. The metalanguage when designing learning resources is an important point, because it strongly affects the usefulness, interoperability and re-usability of a learning resource and its assets. In short, IMS LD can be described as an XML-based description of requirements for e-Learning based on the conceptual model of "people doing activities with resources". The emphasis on activities is important, both from a pedagogical perspective as well as from an educational technology perspective, as the XML describes how the different activities should be organised. This includes which roles the different users in the learning scenario have, how the activities will flow during the learning scenario and when and how the users will use the different resources available to them.

This report's main purpose is to inform the designers and developers of the toolbox with ideas on how to create a framework and architecture for the reuse of content and pedagogical methods. This will be based on exploration of IMS LD and its ability to model collaborative learning processes and how it is possible to extract such processes from the learning resource.