EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

• CELEBRATE was a large-scale 30-month IST demonstration project (ending in Nov. 2004)) coordinated by European Schoolnet. It addressed all parts of the educational content value chain and involved 23 participants including Ministries of Education, universities, leading educational publishers, content developers, VLE vendors and technology suppliers from 11 countries. The project particularly demonstrated the viability of an open source ‘brokerage system’ architecture and federated search capability. The lessons learned in CELEBRATE can be found in the project deliverables at:
  http://celebrate.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/index_celebrate.cfm
• CALIBRATE is a 30-month IST project ending in March 2008 that particularly seeks to involve partners from new member states and connect their content repositories http://calibrate.eun.org. The aim is to connect repositories from Ministries of Education in Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia and to provide a test bed of 80 schools with access to both this network of repositories and a ‘learning toolbox’, a new web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources http://lemill.net. Research has also been carried out in CALIBRATE related to semantic interoperability. As well as further developing the LOM-based Application Profile developed in the CELEBRATE project, CALIBRATE has carried out research into the curriculum mapping of learning resources from four countries (Austria, Belgium/Flanders, Czech Republic, Poland) involving the development of both Topic and Action-verb vocabularies and the development of a curriculum mapping tool.
• MELT is a 27-month eContentplus ‘content enrichment project’ ending in December 2008 http://info.melt-project.eu. The aim is to enrich content (from a network of linked repositories) with semantically well-defined metadata. In the first year of the project, experienced indexers have enriched MELT content with new metadata using a LOM-based Application Profile. In the second year of the project, teachers will use MELT social tagging tools to further enrich approximately 40,000 learning resources and 100,000 learning assets with additional tags (using a folksonomy approach). An evaluation will be carried out of both content enrichment approaches.
  
  Screenshot of beta version of the MELT portal (December 2007)
• The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools is not a centralised portal, but a framework that supports interoperability of content repositories. http://lre.eun.org. The LRE will be launched as a public service for schools in 2008, building on the results of the CALIBRATE and MELT projects. Initially it will contain a critical mass of open educational resources/assets with Creative Commons licenses from approximately 20 repositories in the LRE federation (including those of 16 Ministries of Education). LRE resources include content for both primary and secondary school pupils and cover all curriculum subjects. As part of the LRE initiative, EUN is also working with both public and private sector Associate Partners that wish to make resources available to schools. Associate Partners are provided with a first level of free advice and support including attendance at workshops and access to tools that show them how to: connect a portal or VLE to the LRE federation; implement the LRE application profile and use multilingual vocabularies; automatically translate LOM metadata, automatically generate metadata from given learning resources and organise metadata tagging workflows; make their metadata available for harvesting; build, install and manage open source turnkey solutions for building learning resources repositories.

Eva Suba, EDEN, presented the LOGOS project (www.logosproject.com) on behalf of Zsolt Markus, Antenna Hungária Ltd., Hungary. A short summary is provided in the following.

The LOGOS project has a budget of € 3,732,400. The 3 year project receives funding from the EC (€ 2,634,200). It counts 15 partners including partners with repositories (e.g. EduWeb, Sofia Digital, and University of Brighton). Antenna Hungaria is the project co-ordinator.

The main objectives of the project are:

• To integrate IP-based, DVB and mobile technologies for cross-media delivery of learning materials.
• To enable the use of existing digital archives as sources of adaptable learning resources.

The main goals are:

• Development of learning scenarios for the use of the LOGOS platform in different learning and social contexts e.g. learning about cultural heritage, learning from mobile TV, health information with personalised tests, studying iconography.
• Development of an environment for transforming digitised knowledge in courseware objects.
• Development and implementation of a knowledge-on-demand ubiquitous learning platform.
• Extended assessment and validation of the functionality and usability of the LOGOS platform by authors/lecturers and learners.

“Basically, it is a set of tools to create content which will then be played on the different devices.” An innovative platform feature is the fact that it will support a personalized learning experience.

The teacher/trainer/professor will store the learning design. The learner’s profile is stored with basic data. When the learner enrols he/she refines the profile, with his/her needs, how she/he learns, etc. The system combines the two and aims at providing the best learning experience for the user. That is instead of one learning strategy many should be supported by this strategy! The detailed learning model (not final yet) can be found in the presentation.

At the moment the LOGOS framework is being evaluated. A user evaluation will take place in September-October including needs for further enhancements. EdReNe members are invited to take part. Eva Suba also invited the EdReNe members to the 2^nd LOGOS Open workshop, September 3^rd in Varna, Bulgaria.

A comment was added by an EdReNe member: Have you studied the use a mobile phone for learning? The member’s experience from another project with mobile phones in a learning environment was: “They work in greenhouse conditions not in real life”.