GLOBE

GLOBE is a consortium of online services and tools that will provide an integrated search of learning objects for individuals and educational institutions worldwide. The consortium will provide a distributed network of learning objects that meet quality standards. By sharing the resources through a federated search, strategic alliances and technical interfaces need only be made once, but all of GLOBE benefits from these partnerships.

The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance has been established between the following founding members: the ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Network Australia (EdNA Online) in Australia, eduSourceCanada in Canada, Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) in the US, and National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan. These organisations have committed to work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content.

GLOBE is being designed to serve:

• Individual end users who are members of educational institutions or life-long learners that need an efficient means to find and evaluate learning materials and to quickly identify those materials most valuable to them.
• Higher education institutions that need to provide faculty, staff, and students access to high quality learning materials within budgetary constraints and in-house expertise limitations.
• Vocational education and training institutions that need to provide faculty, staff, and students access to high quality learning materials that satisfy accreditation standards within budgetary constraints and in-house expertise limitations.
• Corporate training programs that need to provide workers with high quality learning materials that satisfy business needs w within budgetary constraints and in-house expertise limitations.
• K-12 schools and institutions that need to provide teachers, staff, and students access to high quality learning materials that satisfy educational standards within budgetary constraints and in-house expertise limitations.
• Publishers that need to provide managed distribution of their learning materials to large and select audiences.
• Digital library organizations that need low maintenance access to highly reliable, high quality (authentic, localized) learning content and need to provide enhanced services to their constituents by searching of other digital libraries.

A GLOBE Objective: Within twelve months, users will be able to access learning resources across five countries and regions. The network will use federated search technologies to search across multiple databases and libraries and will adopt a user centered approach to resource discovery.

Read the Press Release

Read an interview of Shimizu Yasutaka, President of the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and Professor Emeritus at the Tokyo Institute of Technology by EDUCAUSE Vice President Diana G. Oblinger about NIME, about IT in Japanese colleges and universities, and about issues facing higher education worldwide.