We propose an environment that enables authors to create learning repositories by collecting and annotating learning content using a consensually agreed vocabulary and learners to explore the repositories based on relevant staring points for exploration. The authors' support includes: (i) tools for creating an ontological structure, partially populated with learning resources, to be used as a skeleton for structuring and organizing course related resource repositories, and (ii) help in selecting names for new concepts/topics combined with their subject identification. Besides the conventional querying and browsing support for learners, the focus is on tasks that imply exploratory search requiring extensive navigation on the part of the user. In this context we propose a method for finding good staring points for navigation designed to assist learners in performing open-ended search tasks in learning repositories.