A new paradigm of ranking & searching in learning object repository

With the development of internet and search engine, users are thought to obtain everything through corresponding web services. Although general purpose searching such as one provided by Google is powerful, searching mechanism for different purposes has to rely on specific metadata. We followed SCORM and CORDRA to develop a registry system named MINE Registry for storing and managing the learning objects. As a contribution, we propose the concept of "Reusability Tree" to represent the relationships among relevant Learning Objects and to enhance CORDRA. We further collect relevant information while users are utilizing Learning Objects, such as citations and time period persisted. The feedbacks from community users are also considered as critical elements for evaluating significance degree of Learning Objects. Through these factors, we propose a mechanism to weight and rank Learning Objects in the MINE Registry, in addition to other external learning objects repositories.