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:

• Ariadne Foundation
• COSL (The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning)
• education.au limited
• European Schoolnet
• III (Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan)
• KERIS (Korea Education & Research Information Service)
• LACLO (The Latin American Community of Learning Objects)
• LORNET
• MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online teaching, USA)
• NIME (National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan)

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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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.org).
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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MERLOT
MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. 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's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

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NIME
NIME is National Institute for Multimedia Education in Japan. In Higher Education, NIME provides support for the spread and encouragement of education using ICT including e-learning through:

• enriching data provision capabilities of universities, such as e-learning
• making course modules, support for online transmission
• development and provision of e-learning courses
• responding to copyright issues
• surveys and research
• support for the training of teaching staff

In Lifelong Learning, NIME is developing a learning support system to provide easy opportunities for young people and those in irregular employment, mothers rearing children, and elderly people to gain knowledge and business skills that will be useful in gaining employment and work.
In Primary and Secondary Education, NIME does empirical research into the effects of education using ICT.

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