Towards an Open Repository of Teaching Resources

In this paper we describe our work to create a set of usability tools for CLARE, an EPrints installation storing Learning Objects. These tools include Web 2.0 style presentation and comments, and a concept map browser. Although the evaluation of our tools was broadly positive, through workshops with the language teaching community we discovered that a Learning Object repository is too heavyweight to be used as an everyday tool for sharing learning resources. In this paper we present the new requirements we elicited from the community, who wanted a lightweight, learning resource repository, with little metadata overhead, following the interface best-practices of popular online repository sites such as Flickr and YouTube