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Digital Repositories and Course Management
What's the first easy step we could do to integrate an digital repository like MetaMedia or DSpace with a course management system like Stellar or Sakai?
Start by just going one way
I'd suggest that you start by being able to pull materials in from the repository. Repositories ten to demand a bit of work before something is added in, because the want good metadata since they will be storing these materials for a long time. Course management systems are designed s that instructors can add materials as quickly as possible. So start moving materials in the easier direction: Repository → Course management.
Use whatever metadata exists
There's no reason an instructor looking for materials for their course should be confronted with a black screen. We know quite a bit about the class they are teaching. It's title, it's department, whether it's for undergraduates, etc. Use that to make suggestions. So as soon as an instructor clicks "search the repository" they get a page with the traditional search box, but also a list of suggestions. "You are teaching the course Ancient Rome so you might find these resources handy."
Encourage instructors to add more metadata to their class, so they'll get better suggestions. Then when they day comes that we're ready to add materials from the course management system to the repository, we'll have a lot class metadata to plug in.
Once that initial step is done there are many more possibilities (creating special collections, student collections, federated searches and on and on) but this simple way to pull course materials from repository would be a great first step.