The Gateway to Educational Materials: An Evaluation Study (Year 4)

http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf

Before there were ‘learning object repositories,’ educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in ‘subject-based catalogues’ or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There’s nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it’s a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. – SWL