DER in Portugal: state-of-the-art of the two major Repositories in Elementary and Secondary Education

• Autor(a) principal: Castro, Cornélia
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Ferreira, Sérgio André, Andrade, António
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/8745
• topic: Digital Educational Resources; Evaluation; Quality; Repositories

In the last decade, there has been an expansion of Repositories of Digital Educational Resources (DER), funded and stimulated by government authorities and non-profit institutions, in order to publish, collect, distribute and pre-serve DER. In this environment, inspired by the Open Content Movement, it is recognized the importance of the vast heri-tage of DER, produced by the collective intelligence, for pedagogical innovation. Following this trend, in Portugal, about three years ago, two repositories were created at the elementary and secondary education levels: Schools Portal, of Gov-ernment responsibility with a generalist vocation, covering the entire spectrum of the curriculum and the House of Sciences, headed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which is a private institution of public utility, and dedicated to the areas of natural and exact sciences. In this study the state of the art of these two repositories is presented once they are the ones most visible in Portugal in what concerns the main dimensions that interfere on their quality. The methodology of data col-lection was based on the analysis of the portals from the point of view of the producers and users of the DER of the reposi-tories. The main results and conclusions are presented and considerations about the factors that in the future may contribute to the sustainable improvement of some of the characteristics of the repositories covered in this study are stated.