EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

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 from the Flanders part of Belgium. The goals for KlasCement is 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. It is more successful in primary than in secondary except for some subjects.

KlasCement is an initiative of a non-profit organization. It is maintained by five teachers funded by the government (one working fulltime, the rest work part time, corresponding to 3 fulltime persons). In addition volunteers and persons funded by KlasCement assist in the development of the portal.

In June 2008 KlasCement had 38.000 unique members. 2/3 was teachers. They gain 50 new members a day and have 5000 unique visitors. More than 4500 learning objects in 5 categories: news, websites, docs, software and weblogs. Most of the objects are Word and PowerPoint files. However, the repository includes 700 software packages and 1000+ websites.

Everything is submitted by teachers. Quality is important, content and metadata is moderated. Furthermore, every second year the 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. In the future KlasCement will support packages following SCORM.

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 500 points. When the members click on a learning resource they loose 2 points. When 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 etc. (1000 points). “Everything you do on the portal, you earn points” and it works!

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.klascement.net/universal, KlasCement has collected the learning objects that travel well (as part of the MELT project). Metadata is not translated yet. It is considered to use Google’s translator. There are 250 learning objects on this subsite.