Belgium, The Flemish Community
Share and reuse, example of a web 2.0 repository: klascement.net
KlasCement is a portal for and by education (teachers). It is a project form the non-profit organisation EduCentrum vzw and is mainly financed by the Ministry of Education of Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. The goals for EduCentrum vzw are to support the exchange of learning objects and good practices, to stimulate cooperation between everyone involved in education, and to help finding a solution for the digital divide.
The target users of KlasCement are primary and secondary education, teacher training and adult education.
In March 2011 KlasCement had 67 000 unique members. 2/3 is a teacher. The portal gains 50 new members a day and has 5000 to 7000 absolute unique visitors every school day (Google Analytics). The content (March 2011): almost 20 000 user generated learning objects in 9 categories: news and activities, websites, documents, software, good practices, exercises, audio, video and images.
Most of the content is submitted by teachers, every school day 35 new contributions. Quality is important, content and metadata are moderated. Furthermore, every second year a resource is “put into moderation” again to ensure the relevance and quality. An accessibility label is added as well.
There is a simple and an advanced way of submitting documents. The simple method only requests the mandatory IEEE LOM metadata. The advanced method allows the teacher to fill in all details. Licensing is according to Creative Commons.
KlasCement has observed that newsletters with weekly changes generate many visits to the portal. The content of the newsletter is adjusted to the members’ profile (each member has a profile on KlasCement). RSS feeds are important as well. The concept is difficult to explain to teachers. However, when they see the benefits, they really appreciate it.
On the portal it is possible to save personal favourites, give comments and marks, and communicate by internal mail.
Point system stimulates sharing
A new member receives 1000 points. When the members click on a learning resource they loose 2 points. Before they have lost all their points, they receive an e-mail with a request to share objects. The teachers gain points when they share documents/websites, rate and review, etc. “Everything you do on the portal, you earn points” and it works!
Multicurricula and multilingual
The portal is available in Flanders and in the Netherlands. On KlasCement.be you’ll find only the Belgian members and their content. Idem for KlasCement.nl. It works with the two curricula and all content metadata is mapped. On the central website, KlasCement.net, where you have all members and all content, the website shows the metadata and curricula of the visitor, depending on his profile.
The portal is completely translated into English! Teachers out of the different European countries are using KlasCement as their place to share learning resources. Please visit http://www.klascement.eu for the English version with members out of all European countries, except BE and NL, and their content. Do share!
KlasCement.net
KlasCement in other projects
KlasCement.net is added to EduRep, which means the objects also can be searched by every school in The Netherlands.
At www.unilearning.eu, KlasCement has collected the learning objects that travel well (as part of the eQNet project). Metadata is also translated thanks to Google Translation.
