Organizations from around the world have formed a global alliance to make shared online learning resources available to educators and students around the world.

The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between the following founding members: the ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, education.au in Australia, LORNET in Canada, Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) in the USA, and National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan. These organizations have committed to work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content. Since its inception, GLOBE has attracted the interest of other organisations with similar goals and as a result, the GLOBE community continues to grow. The following list represents the current GLOBE member organisations:

• AL-Quds University
• Ariadne Foundation
• COSL (The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning)
• education.au limited
• European Schoolnet
• III (Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan)
• ISKME (the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education)
• KERIS (Korea Education & Research Information Service)
• LACLO (The Latin American Community of Learning Objects)
• LORNET
• METAL- Inter-University Center for e-Learning (IUCEL)
• MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online teaching, USA)
• The Open University of Japan, Center of ICT and Distance Education (OUJ-CODE)

AL-Quds University
Al-Quds University (http://www.alquds.edu/), founded in 1984, is the only Arab university in Jerusalem. The University provides higher education and community services within the Jerusalem area and to the neighbouring towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank. Al-Quds University is “life itself” for more than 11 000 undergraduate and graduate students who come from all over Palestine to study in Jerusalem. Al-Quds dedicated faculty and staff are committed to providing the kind of higher education that will empower individuals to assume meaningful control over their lives. Al-Quds strive to give students the necessary tools to overcome overwhelming challenges and to shape a successful future.

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Ariadne Foundation
The Ariadne Foundation is a European Association open to the World, for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. The core of the ARIADNE infrastructure is a distributed network of learning repositories.
The ARIADNE Foundation was created to exploit and further develop the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula.
Benefits & Services to Members:

• Users involved:
  • Authors of pedagogical documents: Faculty, Education Managers, Students
  • Producers & admininistrators of training courses: Trainers, Training Managers, Ped. Engineers
  • End Users: Researchers; Students, Trainees, Open & Distance Learners
• Technologies and/or approach used:
  • Share & reuse of pedagogical components through indexing and storage in knowledge pools
  • Use of adequate telematics chanels according to situation; use of novel authoring & segmentation tools
  • Pedagogic components approach, structured curricula; individualized view of course
• Expected benefits for the citizen:
  • Better continuous formation schemes
  • Easier access to formation for a number of disandvantaged socio-geographic categories
• Expected benefits for the users of the application:
  • More effective and motivating learning scenarios (learners & trainees)
  • Better productivity and new philosophy of collaboration (authors of pedagogical material)
  • Better communication and co-working schemes (researchers)
• Expected benefits for the European Industries:
  • Better, faster and more economical entry-level or continuous training schemes
• Contribution to EU-policies:
  • Possible factor for harmonizing education & training policies throughout Europe. Important factor in promoting collaboration between European educators and comprehension between European learners.

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COSL
The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL), at Utah State University is a research and development center focuses on developing systems, tools and services to enable open education internationally.

COSL’s flagship project is eduCommons, an open source, opencourseware management system that enables universities worldwide to host and publish an OpenCourseWare (OCW). See http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/adopters for a list of universities using eduCommons. COSL is a leader in the OCW movement and works closely with the OpenCourseWare Consortium and its member organizations to promote the development of OCW around the world.

COSL also develops tools and services to provide Web 2.0 support for providers of open educational resources. These projects include:

• OCW Finder (www.ocwfinder.org, meta-search engine of OCW sites, primarily in English)
• OER Recommender (www.oerrecommender.org, recommender service operating between OCW sites and selected National Science Digital Library collections and pathways)
• MOCSL/Folksemantic Tools (www.folksemantic.org, collection of Web 2.0 tools)

COSL looks to bring the wealth of OCW resources into GLOBE to further extend the dissemination and availability of high-quality educational resources. Additionally COSL may be able to provide individual GLOBE members with services and tools to extend existing services.

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education.au limited
education.au is a not-for-profit ministerially owned agency, governed through a Board by nominees from the Australian Government, higher education, school education, and vocational education and training sectors.
The agency focuses on the needs of Australian education, training and careers within the context of emerging information and communications technologies (ICTs) and standards as they apply to the Internet.
education.au brings value to Australian education and training through:

• Managing large, sensitive, complex and innovative projects in education, training and careers that benefit stakeholders
• Working closely and collaboratively with stakeholders
• Bringing leading edge experience and expertise in Internet-based content and services and standards to benefit projects
• Reducing costs nationally by building national infrastructure to provide shared online content and services.
  education.au collaborates with stakeholders in education and training communities to develop and manage online services that are of benefit to the education, training and careers sector and are national in scope.

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European Schoolnet
European Schoolnet (EUN) is a unique not-for-profit consortium of 28 ministries of education in Europe created in 1997. EUN provides major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaboration and leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology.

Since its establishment, European Schoolnet (EUN) has been at the forefront in supporting the European dimension in schools. This goal is achieved through projects, competitions, activities, communication and information exchange at all levels of school education using innovative technologies.

European Schoolnet is at the crossroads of national and regional education networks, building synergies between communities of teachers, learners, developers, researchers and policy-makers.

EUN’s work is organised in three strands corresponding to its core objective of supporting the efficient use of ICT in education and the European dimension in education: School networking and services; knowledge building and exchange on ICT policy and practice and Interoperability and content exchange.

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III
III, The Institute for Information Industry, Tiawan was founded in 1979, and was sponsored/funded by both government and private sectors. Although III is not a government organization, the public tends to treat III as a quasi-government organization (quango). This neutral position gives III an advantage to help government to set up/execute government ICT policy such as promoting the ICT industry.)
III’s goal is to develop Taiwan as one of the leaders in information industry.
There are 2 missions to achieve this goal. These are:

• Facilitate the Development of Taiwan’s ICT Industry
• Promote the Deployment of ICT in Public & Private Sectors

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ISKME (the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education)
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, ISKME, (www.iskme.org ) is an independent, nonprofit research institute that conducts social science research, develops research-based innovations, and facilitates field building to improve knowledge sharing in education. ISKME is known for its award-winning OER Commons initiative (www.oercommons.org ), as well as its international research agenda on information and knowledge use in the education sector. As an innovator working at the forefront of understanding how developments in open source, social networking, knowledge collaboration, and social media can impact—and already have impacted—K-20 educational practice and policy, ISKME’s research enables schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them to expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success.

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KERIS
KERIS (Korea Education & Research Information Service) is a national institute founded by the Ministry of Education & Human Resource Development in Korea.
KERIS is doing its utmost to develop human resources through e-Learning, regain public trust in education, lay a foundation for a knowledge and information-based society by activation of e-Learning, and to enhance national education and research competitiveness through academy digitalization.
KERIS performs activities as follows,

• Organization and operation of the e-Learning system to improve K12 public education
• Support for development of creative personnel needed to lead a knowledge-based society in the 21st century
• Support for the qualitative improvement of classroom lessons and the fundamental improvement of public education through the use of ICT
• Management of user-centered knowledge and information resources through the Research Information Sharing Service
• Organization of the e-Educational administration service to enhance the efficiency and transparency of educational administration and the civil service
• Support for the cyber learning system which allows anyone access to education

About KOCW
KOCW stands for Korea Open CourseWare. It provides information about the locations of e-Learning contents for higher education developed by universities of Korea based on KEM(Korea Education Metadata).

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LACLO
The Latin American Community of Learning Objects (LACLO) is an open group of people and institutions interested in the research, development and deployment of Learning Object related technologies in the Latin American educational sector. Its main goal is to articulate different regional efforts to spread the advantages and benefits of Learning Objects. All its work is focused in preparing Latin America for the great educational challenge of this century: offering personalized educational resources to anybody, anywhere and in anyplace.
The main tools that LACLO use to reach its goal are:

• FLOR (Federated Latin American Learning Object Repository) : A federation of the Learning Object Repositories of the different educational institutions in the region. Each interested institution can share their learning objects in FLOR. Currently FLOR has more than 6000 Information and Learning Objects and we expect to duplicate that number by the end of 2008
• LACLO (Latin American Conference on Learning Objects): An annual scientific gathering where researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning field could present their research and where deployment experience can be shared. In 2008, LACLO will be organized in Mexico
• Joint Projects: LACLO support the creation and submission of joint projects between its members. These projects are usually financed by regional or international funding organizations. This year, LACLO is executing 2 of international project

The main communication channel between LACLO members is its Web Site: www.laclo.org. This community oriented Website provides a virtual venue for discussion and information dissemination. Currently, more than 100 individuals are active members of LACLO.

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LORNET
The LORNET research network is actually the major Canadian project in Learning Object repositories. The network has taken over the technology developed previously in EDUSOURCE and previous Canadian projects (POND, CAREO, CLOE, SavoirNET, CANLOM) to push it forward. It groups more than a hundred researchers, professionals and graduate students, distributed in six Canadian universities, five research centers and four research chairs. It was awarded$7.5 million over five years by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, the main research agency of the Canadian government. During this period, companies and other organizations also contribute substantial amounts of cash and in-kind support.
LORNET conducts research on networked repositories of learning objects, as a key element in today’s major international trends in distance learning and knowledge management. The focus is to make documents, tools, and Web services available for learning and knowledge management within institutions and organizations. It holds and annual conference and a bi-montly information news letter (www.lornet.ca).
LORNET represents Canada within the GLOBE consortium, federating repositories in CANADA together and with other GLOBE partners through its PALOMA software that provides a set of tools: for LOM description of resources, organization of LOM records, a sophisticated rights management to LOMs and resources, three search methods and communication API that provides an SQI service. In the last two year, over 20 000 resources are being referenced for federated search through a number of projects linking a network of 12 university repositories, a College level repositories and K-12 repositories with support from Ministries of Education. The LORNET network is in the process of being transformed into a sustainable not-for-profit institute.

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METAL- Inter-University Center for e-Learning (IUCEL)
METAL is the Inter-University Center for e-Learning (IUCEL http://meital.iucc.ac.il/meital/English/English.htm ), which is part of the Israeli Inter-University Computation Center (IUCC http://www.iucc.ac.il/ ). METAL assists Israeli institutions of higher education – universities and academic colleges – in advancing the use of e-learning technologies.

METAL creates opportunities for institutional connections and collaboration among academic institutes in Israel. Most of METAL’s activity is conducted through several workgroups. The members of the workgroups are representatives of all the institutions that take part in METAL, as well as experts in specific areas.

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MERLOT
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching at www.merlot.org) is a open, leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT’s strategic focus is on serving the needs of higher education yet teachers and learners at all levels of education engaged in both formal and informal teaching and learning are welcome members and contributors to MERLOT. MERLOT’s vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy.

MERLOT maintains its currency through ongoing and continuing communication with its worldwide supporters in a variety of ways, including the annual MERLOT International Conference, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT at http://jolt.merlot.org), member publications, news, and our MERLOT Voices website (http://voices.merlot.org) to enable MERLOT users to communication with others. MERLOT’s open access “Content Builder” tool now enables any MERLOT member to build, post, and catalog there open educational resources to share with the world.

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The Open University of Japan, Center of ICT and Distance Education (OUJ-CODE)
Center of ICT and Distance Education, the Open University of Japan (OUJ-CODE; formerly, National Institute of Multimedia Education, NIME)

The Open University of Japan (OUJ) is a distance university, which was established in 1983 in order to provide a quality higher education in innovative and distance ways. OUJ delivers learning content and various student support services through broadcasting (TV and radio), printed materials and/or the Internet. As the core university in lifelong learning (LLL) in Japan, OUJ opens to everyone in wide-ranging stages of life and realizes learning spaces in which students can learn “anytime and anywhere”.
National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME), a founding member of GLOBE, was abolished in 2009 and merged into OUJ as an institute, called “Center of ICT and Distance Education (CODE)”. CODE succeeded the main functions to support HE institutions in the context of ICT use for educational reforms, including the national portal and content search system, under the governmental funding. In addition, CODE extends the functions beyond the differences between school categories as an institution of the national center of LLL, OUJ.

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