National Digital Learning Resources Network

Education Services Australia manages the National Digital Learning Resources Network for the Ministerial Council on Education Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA). This includes:

• managing and extending the national collection of digital resources
• aligning digital resources to the Australian Curriculum
• supporting sharing of digital resources between jurisdictions
• maintaining licencing and copyright for the national collection
• maintaining the technical infrastructure
• hosting of existing systems to facilitate national distribution of
  digital resources.

The National Digital Learning Resources Network builds on ministers' investment in The Learning Federation initiative 2001–09. The national digital resource collection, infrastructure and standards have been collaboratively developed and are jointly owned by all jurisdictions.

The National Digital Learning Resources Network contains over 12,000 digital resources that are free for use in all Australian schools. The resources are made available to teachers through State and Territory portals or Scootle and to pre-service teachers through eContent. They are provided in a variety of formats that include:

• interactive, multimedia resources
• audio, photo and video resources that result from partnerships with national
  private and public cultural and collection agencies
• open-ended tools for teachers and students to create learning resources
• interactive assessment resources
• work samples
• collections of curriculum resources
• teacher ideas and units of work.

The national infrastructure includes:

• a repository for digital resources commissioned and licensed for the
  national collection
• a metadata repository providing access to resources in cultural
  agencies and government and non-government organisations
• an exchange enabling sharing of resources by teachers and jurisdictions
• web services linking to State and Territory repositories
• Scootle and eContent national portals.

The Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) and agreed standards for digital resources, technical infrastructure, metadata and rights management support a national operating environment for the digital resources and infrastructure.

The National Digital Learning Resources Network is informed by research on the use of digital resources in teaching and learning.