Foreign language teachers use online repositories on everyday basis to find appropriate activities for their lessons. The question is: How can content providers support them in finding exactly what they need and in retrieving high quality resources?This question has been discussed in the context of the European project "Open Discovery Space". The answers are: a taxonomy of searching mechanism and quality criteria of online resources from the methodologic point of view. Correspondingly, this paper introduces a classification of digital resources according to the four skills (speaking, writing, reading, listening/watching) and two language use types (grammar, vocabulary), representing the changing paradigm of foreign language teaching and learning. Further the paper identifies quality criteria for designing online learning materials with regard to content, methodology, technic and design. Finally, the findings are illustrated by an example of a learning scenario.Keywords e-learning, classification, quality criteria, OER, foreign language learning
IntroductionThe Open Discovery Space 1 Portal (ODSP) is one of the richest online repositories providing teaching material for education. The overall goal of the ODS project is to develop and implement a web-based access point where teachers can find educational resources made by others. Teachers can readily use these materials in their own classes, or adapt them to better match their particular educational context and the capabilities and learning styles of their students.To successfully develop a purpose-built portal, the users and their needs and their expectations towards such a portal are the key to establish a sustainable pan-European ODS portal of educational resources (Laurillard, Oliver, Wasson, & Hoppe, 2009).One question is central to this issue: what do teachers need in order to uptake resource-based elearning? With this question in mind first we focus on the needs and expectations of teachers towards the ODSP.In order to find out what teachers need for the adaptation of e-learning, stakeholders in the context of school education across Europe were invited to 92 workshops in 19 European countries. 2300 participants attended the workshops: school teachers (in-service or pre-service) of all education levels, teacher trainers, curriculum developers, and educational policy makers from local/regional/state level, students and parents participated.The goal of the workshops was to build an initial contact with these stakeholders, to explore their teaching praxis and raise awareness of resource based learning (RBL). At the same time the visionary