The Victorian Education Channel: Its role in building a knowledge network

The Victorian Education Channel is a portal to online education and training resources for Victorians. The Channel allows students, teachers, parents and the wider community to readily access a collection of 300,000 quality resources which have been selected for their relevance to education and training in Victoria. Since its launch in February 2001, the Channel has been widely accepted, particularly in schools. The resources that the Channel points to have been collected from a variety of third party organisations, such as museums, galleries and newspapers. The emphasis has been on Victorian organisations in order to provide a richness of local content. Channel technology allows metadata records to be automatically generated to enable discoverability of the resources. It is envisaged our locally focussed resource discovery service will become part of a globally connected service which is responsive to the specific but varying needs of Australian learners and teachers. Ideally this service would be the product of a "knowledge network" that harnesses knowledge about learning, teaching and useful resources from stakeholders across Australia. A model is proposed consisting of a series of interconnected metadata driven portals, each acting as a Key Service Point (KSP) for a specific jurisdiction. Each domain portal would be responsible for gathering knowledge about learning resources of special local significance.