EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

• Dynamic table of content display for a course.
• Automatic validating of navigation rules (SCORM).
• Tracking status update on eXact Siter.
• Access to optional services associated to courses (Forum, Chat).

Both the projects are illustrated in the sections below.

The main goal of Gold initiative is to reinforce the adoption of e-learning technology in order to form a wide community of teachers which shares experiences and digital material.

Together with the description of their practices, the teachers must also send at least one digital resource they created within the practice, thus reinforcing the adoption of digital tools.

Teachers’ pedagogical experiences are linked to digital educational resources by using descriptors from a Thesaurus, the European Treasury Browser (ETB) ². The Thesaurus is accessible through a web interface enabling users to browse the categories of descriptors and to explore the relationships among the terms. Such tool facilitates the search activities within the repository and, at the same time, encourages teachers to become more familiar with a quite complex indexing system for educational content.

Pupils of each school have been provided with a 30 € virtual purse for each discipline per year to acquire learning objects (at the present time, the curricula subjects available are Italian language and Math) and use them in a virtual collaborative environment.

A total of 4 million euro budget was allocated to school (around 8000 euro per school).

The Digiscuola platform consists of three entities:

• The bibliographic catalogue based on metadata provided by publishers along with learning objects the catalogue allows teachers to search on learning object metadata and select the desired content. In order to foster interoperability between other LOs/Bibliographic repositories, metadata provided by publishers must conform with LOM metadata standard and the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) have been recommended as the standard identifier for the learning resources uploaded on the platform.
• The virtual market place featuring e-commerce services, enabling schools to purchase learning objects thanks to ministry funding;
• The virtual learning environment (VLE) within which students use the learning objects; in order to facilitate content re-use on multiple learning platforms, learning objects available on the platforms are SCORM compliant.

The project also includes training courses for teachers devoted to foster the use of technologies in their daily teaching activities and a specific training on new didactical approach based on the use of digital content.

Educational publishers that originally joined the Digiscuola platform represent the actual offer of learning objects on the Italian school market. As a matter of fact, the educational book publishing sector in Italy is characterized by an high level of concentration ³ and the main five players (Zanichelli, DeAgostini Scuola, RCS Scuola, Edmund Paravia Bruno Mondadori - recently acquired by Pearson Education) holding an overall market share of 30% are all participating to the project. Furthermore, beside the traditional publishers also newcomers recently entering the digital educational content market segment (e.g. Garamond, Trevi digital media, Giunti Interactive Labs, Cineca) are joining the project.

In September 2007, the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Innovation signed an agreement for the extension of the project that will evolve in a more advanced platform with new features and extended number of users.

The most important innovations in the new phase of the project concern:

• availability of platform services to primary and secondary schools of the whole national territory
• extension of subjects from original two (Italian and Mathematics) to entire national curriculum
• inclusion in the VLE of new features for teachers to create and share educational content that will be licensed under Creative Commons;

Call for proposals for schools concerned were opened and best educational projects were awarded with a maximum funding per school of 10.000 euro plus 3 interactive whiteboard, 3 laptops and a training course for teachers on how to use provided technological devices.
Contents produced within the project should be made available within the platform.

The overall budget was 7 million euro of which 3,5 million were dedicated to projects financed and 3,5 million dedicated to purchase of IT devices.

With the academic year 2008-2009, the initiative becomes operative under the new name of InnovaScuola.

Not connected to Digiscuola but aimed at extending availability of technological devices in schools, a call for tender was issued and funding awarded for the purchase of 8.000 interactive whiteboards by secondary schools.

1. Part of the contents of the following sections about the Italian scenario are excerpted from the market survey carried within the framework of the Eleonet project (www.eleonet.org), funded by the eTen programme and coordinated by AIE
2. The ETB Thesaurus (http://etb.eun.org/etb/index.html) was first created in the early 2000 as an outcome of the ETB project (http://etb.eun.org), then it has been continuously also used in European Schoolnet's projects, such as Celebrate (http://celebrate.eun.org) and services to index multilingual learning objects, as it is a useful tool to automate part of the translation work for learning resources that have been indexed in one language. The Thesaurus is now available in 14 languages.
3. On an overall figure of 120 players, only 5 publishers hold the 30% of the market and the first 15 publishers hold half of the entire market share. Source: Ufficio Studi AIE 2006