Describing learning scenarios to share teaching experiences

Finding high-quality educational resources on the Web is a demanding work both for the teachers and for the students. The difficulty stems from the big quantity of didactic resources available in the net, the slight offered functionality of search engines and the lack of good metadata attached to the resources. For these reasons, the attention of the research community is currently focused on improving pedagogical information in the description of Learning Objects, to make them suitable for use in Distance Learning. In order to do this, however, it is necessary to decide how important it is from the informatics standpoint to take into account pedagogical information and, above all, what information needs to be included in order to be able to improve the degree of reusability of LO. On the basis of these premises, it seems to us justifiable to claim that in order to guarantee a high degree of reusability of teaching resources and an adequate level of personalization of learning paths, it is essential to identify all the variables and all the factors that take place in a learning process. This will make it possible to define what other pedagogical information needs to be included. These reflections have led us to create a repository collecting teachers' experiences, and providing them with information on the learning scenarios most suited to reuse of a given teaching resource. For this purpose, a set of specifications (named EXM -experiences metadata) has been drawn up, that guides the teacher's formulation of a description of all the variables and other factors serving to describe a learning/teaching. Adequate description of the teaching resources, therefore, will not only facilitate teachers' retrieval of the desired content but also, and above all, their redesign of learning/teaching contexts, which can thus improve the supply of distance learning contents