HarvestRoad Hive is used to store and manage 'learning' or 'knowledge objects' and their metadata. It assembles these into standards-compliant packages and delivers that content on demand to learning and course-management systems, corporate training systems, or web portals. Hive can interface with almost any enterprise resource planning (ERP), learning, or course-management system and is already integrated with several commonly used course-management systems, authoring, and content-assembly tools from third parties, open source projects, and Giunti Labs.

"For some time, we've been finding that academic institutions - particularly universities - are trying to move away from being reliant on proprietary learning management systems (LMSs) or virtual learning environments (VLEs), as they are known in that sector", explained Angus Turpin, managing director of Giunti Labs UK. "Instead, they are showing a marked preference for open source VLEs such as Moodle."

"This means that they are seeking to re-format the learning content that they have in order to make it useable with the open source VLEs that conform to international interoperability standards such as SCORM. Until now, this migration has had to be done manually", Turpin explained. "Obviously, this is a long, drawn-out process that tends to be both time and labour intensive."

"A number of institutions are now finding that a simpler alternative is to use Giunti Labs' HarvestRoad Hive - a Federated Digital Repository System (FDRS) that manages any form of content used in online learning, corporate training, and knowledge-management initiatives."

HarvestRoad Hive establishes a bridge between islands of content within and across multiple institutions or organisations, regardless of the type of content or purpose for its existence. Consequently, it is able to cope with content in both SCORM-conformant and non-SCORM-conformant (proprietary) VLEs (LMSs).

Professor Mark Stiles, Head of Learning Development and Innovation at Staffordshire University, explained that his team is using HarvestRoad Hive to migrate and feed content that is already in the University's virtual learning environment - Blackboard - into other systems.

He said: "Using HarvestRoad Hive, staff can now share, reuse, and repurpose their content. This is important because it will prevent anyone having to 'reinvent the wheel' and means that we can use investment in eLearning content- which probably represents at least a million pounds of effort - more effectively.

Moreover, innovators using web 2.0 and e-portfolios, for example, can also use the same content - which means that the same content can feed at least three systems at once."

"In addition, we can use Hive to hold course-related information - for example, where a work-based mentor can go to a work-based support portal and get relevant resources. Thus, more than being used merely to develop course material, HarvestRoad Hive can support the entire learning experience."

"We will also be putting the University's research output into HarvestRoad Hive so that it acts as a learning repository for this information, too", he added. "Academics tend to want a repository to be a 'search-and-discover' tool, but unlike a VLE, Hive can also dynamically send targeted material to diverse systems."