Creating a unified digital content supply network for global education: The global grid for learning story so far

Throughout the world significant investments have and are being made in the design and development of digital learning content repositories and brokerage systems to facilitate the exchange of metadata and associated content to K12 educational software systems. While attempts have been made to include commercial content providers, most of these initiatives are organized regionally and financed by government, sub-government or donor agency funding and focus on the sharing of open education resources. The Global Grid for Learning is an initiative funded by Cambridge University Press, a not-forprofit organization, with a vision to create a unified digital content supply network for global education connecting users and software systems to both commercial and open education resources. This paper provides an overview of the initiative and discusses some of the content and metadata challenges encountered to date and how this project has sought to address them. The paper also outlines current efforts made towards systems interoperability.