I'm in Hobart with [Cameron Loudon](http://cameronloudon.com/) (welcome
to the blogosphere Cam) for a couple of RUBRIC-related meetings, which
I'll write about soon.
While we were here I wanted to find out more about '[The Learning
Edge](http://thelearningedge.com.au)', a content management / repository
solution for education which is apparently a product of Tasmania's
largest software development house.
I'd heard from various people that TLE application was around, including
that it has been purchased by Newcastle University, which is a
[RUBRIC](http://www.rubric.edu.au/) partner. My ex-boss Alexander Roche
of The Financial Services Institute of Australasia
([FINSIA](http://www.finsia.edu.au/)) raved about it as a
course-management solution.
Cameron and I were lucky to get a demo from Chris Jones, business
development manager for TLE last night before he jetted off to Malaysia.
The way I see it there are three parts to the software.
At the heart is a **repository**, not unlike the kinds of software we
are dealing with on the RUBRIC project, but with an emphasis on course
materials. A place to keep your digital stuff, complete with a flexible
metadata layer and a slick administration system.
The second module is a way to **organize** that digital stuff into
packages. This includes an HTML editor component, which I thought was
fairly pedestrian (Chris says the new version is better), but also the
ability to grab objects from the repository and sequence them into IMS
packages.
The final part is **integration with Learning Management Systems**; TLE
plugs in to WebCT and Blackboard (and other) software and handles
content management services.
My impression of the software (on the basis of an hour or so's demo) is
that it is a nice general purpose repository (although not necessarily
an Institutional Repository) solution. Some of the administration
interfaces for configuring metadata schemas and metadata input forms
were very impressive, as were some of the copyright management features.
That said, I gather there would be a lot of work to do to make TLE play
nicely in a federated environment like the one the
[MAMS](https://mams.melcoe.mq.edu.au/zope/mams) project is building. For
anything other than completely open access federation to work across
repositories there needs to be a shared language for exchanging
credentials and access policies; there are some important
[standards](https://mams.melcoe.mq.edu.au/zope/mams/kb/standards/topic_view)
in this area (SAML & XACML spring to my mind but there are many more)
that I don't think are yet supported by TLE.
So we have some technical and standards-compliance question, which we'll
do via correspondence with their technical team, and I'll post updates
here.
It's out of scope for the RUBRIC project to look at TLE as a repository
solution, (except to help Newcastle University work out what can be done
with its solution) but it looks to me that it has promise, subject to
some reservations about standards compliance and some as yet unanswered
questions about import and export of content. It's very important to be
able to get all your data out cleanly in a format that can be used to
reconstitute a new instance of the same product, or set up a new
repository using other software.
And one of TLE's competitors, [Harvest
Road](http://www.harvestroad.com/), is playing in the Institutional
Repository space much more aggressively than TLE, we'll try to get a
demo of that when we can too.
Finally, at USQ we have some work to do on the way we manage readings
for online and print access. This involves stuff like tracking how many
times articles are used across the institution, seeking click-through
agreements to copyright terms from students, and auditing what
proportion of a book is being made available. TLE has a lot of features
in this area – it will be worth having a good look at what it might be
able to do for USQ just as an e-reserve, let alone as a WebCT Vista
compatible course-content repository.