• Indhold

EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

Portugal

The current situation

The website of the Directorate-General for Innovation and Curriculum Development of the Portuguese Ministry of Education holds a central repository, which, however, lacks many of the capabilities that more up-to-date repositories offer. It includes links to both digital and paper-based resources, designed by professional and non-professional individuals and organisations alike (http://sitio.dgidc.min-edu.pt/Recursos/Paginas/default2.aspx).

Other organisations which are connected to the Ministry, one way or another, also maintain learning repositories, and amongst them there are those created and maintained by Competence Centres ¹, Teacher Training Centres and Universities. A list of Competence Centres can be found at http://www.erte.dgidc.min-edu.pt/index.php?section=7.

Apart from organisations one way or another connected to the Ministry of Education, there are also some enterprises in the field of the educational use of ICT that keep repositories, some of them rather large and comprehensive. It is the case of Porto Editora (cmultimedia@portoeditora.pt), one of the major Portuguese educational publishers. They sell multimedia products, and among them the most successful Portuguese digital encyclopaedia. They also maintain the largest collection of interactive online resources for all subjects in the Portuguese curriculum, under the name of Virtual School (http://www.escolavirtual.pt/index), a paid service.

Many Portuguese universities keep repositories of educational resources. An example is the one maintained by the University of Minho (http://e-repository.tecminho.uminho.pt/), a DSpace-powered repository containing many open educational resources. Its main aim is to contribute towards preserving, making known and available the educational resources produced by the University (elearning-repository(at)tecminho.uminho.pt).

Another institution, which creates and maintains educational resources, is the Institute Camões (http://www.instituto-camoes.pt), an organism of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which is responsible for the teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language in Universities abroad. It contains the largest repository of educational resources for Portuguese as a Foreign Language (cvc(at)instituto-camoes.pt).

Looking ahead

For the last few years, the University of Évora has been working closely together with the Directorate-General for Innovation and Curriculum Development to create an evaluation and certification system of educational software and, in broader terms, digital educational resources.

At the very beginning, this system was aimed solely at commercial resources, but it has been redefined in order to include non-commercial resources which the Ministry deems priority ones. In the framework of the system 80+ teachers have been trained and they will now act as DER evaluators. The whole system will be fully portable to the new Schools Portal (see below).

The Portuguese Technological Plan for Education is being put into practice and has two main objectives:

the technological update of all Basic and Secondary schools and;
the promotion of the integration and widespread use of ICT in teaching, learning and school administration

This plan revolves around three axes: technology, content and training. The content area will be supported by a Schools Portal to be used by teachers and students in schools all over the country.

The national strategy concerning digital educational resources (DER) has now been defined and includes four main areas:

creation;
evaluation and certification;
deployment and organisation;
educational use/curriculum integration.

Several organisms of the Ministry of Education as well as other institutions, namely universities and consultants in the ICT area, have come together to discuss the best approaches to setting up an educational repository system. The final result of this work has now been finished and the actual implementation will take place at the beginning of November 2008.

There are some characteristics of this repository, which are worth mentioning, the main ones being:

it will hold information about commercial and non-commercial DLRs but may also include non-commercial DLRs themselves;
users will be able to customise their repository;
statistics will include the identification of popular functions, user surveys and the characterisation of user types (registered users);
the system is intended to be user-friendly;
it revolves around a strong notion of user community; however, it is still too soon to know what the response will be.

Other Portuguese educational repositories

General governmental initiatives. Museums, archives and libraries providing access to their resources.

Biblioteca Nacional Digital - with 20,000 documents.

DGEMN - With about 2.5 terabits of information, the Architectural Heritage Information System holds the largest online archive on architecture, engineering and urban planning, with 200,000 drawings, 340,000 photographs and 10,000,000 pages of text.

Resources in Portuguese museums - In matriznet you can find more than 30,000 objects and 45,000 images from museum's collections.

Associations/universities initiatives - (e.g. an initiative to put extra focus on mathematics to influence the students’ choice of education).

GAVE - 1000 mathematics resources 9º year.

APP

Private/business

Microsoft has signed an agreement with 4 ministries in Portugal. Innovative teachers’ project is one of the results. http://www.professoresinovadores.com.pt. The teachers get software etc. and a diploma "Innovative teachers" by Microsoft.

Cidade da Malta

Notes

Competence Centres are local structures, comprising Universities, Schools of Education, associations of Teacher Training Centres, Teacher Associations. They train and support schools and teachers in the use of ICT. They also undertake research and help define national policies.

More information
EdReNe members
EduWeb, Portuguese/Brazilian holding company, based in Portugal.
DGIDC - Direcção-Geral de Inovação e de Desenvolvimento Curricular, Ministry of Education

Presentations
EduWeb
http://edrene.org/presentations/Portugal-EduWeb.ppt

DGIDC - The Repository of the Portuguese Ministry of Education
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/535.ppt