EdReNe – Educational Repositories Network

On behalf of UNI-C’s management Leo Højsholt-Poulsen welcomed all participants; EdReNe members, members of the steering board and user group of the Danish national repository, and the external expert speakers, to UNI-C’s main offices in Copenhagen.

“To UNI-C, as managers of the Danish national repository, there is a close connection between what we learn from colleagues of the EdReNe network, and our visions for strategies of our national platform. We try to copy some of the best ideas, and do our best to avoid less unsuccessful detours.”

He presented the overall agenda idea:
1st day is for both EdReNe members and Danish audience; a day’s sharing of experiences and successful practices.

2nd day is for EdReNe members; equally interesting but with sessions where EdReNe members will also be discussing the role and future of our network.

Karin Levinsen, the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University

In her presentation Karin showed three examples of how Danish pupils and students are using digital resources and the problems concerning finding these resources. From her findings she concluded that there was a weak tradition for user involvement in general, and for applying user centred design approaches. She also noted that we in the future would see a challenge from the cloud and asked for further feasibility studies. See the presentation at: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/812.pptx

Marie Falkesgaard Slot, the National Knowledge Centre for Designs for Learning, Denmark

In her presentation Marie focused on the different actors in the educational world, who are influencing the use of digital materials? And she came with recommendations on how to integrate digital resources in the school. She suggested different models for publishers as well as schools to get digital learning materials more fully integrated into daily practice in the school.

The recommendations from Marie FS concerning digital materials were:

Marie Falkesgaard’s presentation is available to members only from the EdReNe Members zone.

Tommy Byskov Lund, regional manager, NTS-center Midtjylland, Denmark

Tommy referred to the work done previously at EdReNe seminars and focused on the findings on the four major themes: Repository strategies, Standards and interoperability, Engaging users and Rights issues. The presentation ended with group discussions, where the four issues were evaluated: what was important, what could be omitted, what was missing.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/825.pptx

The recommendations of EdReNe have been summarised in the annexes of the EdReNe final report http://edrene.org/results/deliverables/EdReNeD1.11FinalReport.pdf, pages 30 – 33.

A brief summary of the statements from the group discussions are given in Annex I of this report. Tommy presented this humoristic drawing to illustrate the gap between users and content.

Allard Strijker, SLO, and Henk Nijstad, Kennisnet

Allard argued for the need to focus on Learning Trajectories in relation to the work with repositories. But in order to work on this exercise we need a clear understanding of the term “Learning trajectory” as well as a common vocabulary. Allard ended by pointing out what technical requirements were needed for working with Learning trajectories and what standards were being established.

Allard showed this example of a Learning Trajectory to illustrate the concept.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/823.pptx

Diny Golder, Executive director, JES & Co., USA

Diny introduced an Achievement Standard, which is an assertion by someone in authority of what someone (a teacher or a learner) in an educational context should do or know.

She reported on the goals and results of her work on the ASN data model for these assertions, their source document and the relationships among assertions and documents.

See the presentation at https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/824.ppt

Fredrik Paulsson, IML

Fredrik Paulsson gave an overview of the Annofolio project, which aims to present the curriculum as a service on the Semantic Web. Through analysis of the Swedish curriculum the project analysed the documents of the Curriculum, added structural and semantic markup, so it could be used as a component in digital services. Fredrik gave a few examples for the use of this methodology:

• Connect the curriculum to Learning Object Repositories (after a similar markup process)
• For chunking up the documents and for creating digital compendia
• Connecting personal development plans and the curriculum
• For analyzing the curriculum and for quality work

Fredrik pointed out the next phase in the research phase:

Leonie Verhoeff, Kennisnet

In her presentation Leonie focused on a “learning trajectory” as defined as “The assumptions made by a teacher when planning a sequence of lessons”. She drew on several examples from NSDL, National Science Digital Library, as well as from Thinkfinity, Pennsylvania and National Geographic. To see examples, Verizon Foundation's Think Finity program has produced nine discipline-specific, standards-based Web sites geared primarily toward K-12 teachers and students.

Get resources from Thinkfinity website.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/826.ppt

Roger Larsen, SVP of Market Development & Strategy, Pearson education platforms, Founder of Fronter

Roger gave a presentation of various delivery and content repository strategies from a publisher's point of view. Among them is Pearson Resource Gateway (http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/Primary/GlobalPages/ResourceGateway/ResourceGateway.aspx), which is a repository populated with a large number of curriculum tagged multimedia content for UK schools, and Equella (http://www.equella.com/), which is a digital repository. Roger stressed the importance of getting mapping between various national curriculums / learning standards, which content can be tagged against.

Claes Sønderriis, Systime

Claes gave a presentation of the link between the book and the web and pointed to two publications that Systime recently had released in mathematics and psychology for upper secondary education: plus.systime.dk and ibog.psykologiensveje.systime.dk.

In Denmark Systime has registered iBog as a trademark. Unfortunately they did not manage to register the English version of the word (iBook) in time …
Claes outlined the thoughts and considerations in relation to the electronic publications.

Kim Conrad Petersen, ConDidact

Kim went through the publications from his publishing house: Danish Animals, European Countries and some electronic text-books to be used in Danish schools. He stressed that in order to have successful on-line materials, it was important to focus on accessibility, information levels and interactivity. See the full presentation at:

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/822.ppt

Hans de Four, KlasCement

Hans highlighted the factors that had made KlasCement a successful website used by as many as half the teachers in Flanders. KlasCement was started as a bottom-up initiative by teachers for teachers, and the content is checked by teachers. Within its lifetime over 12 years it has gone from a private project to a large scale project with funds from national as well as international level.

Hans showed the organization behind KlasCement, the way the collection of material was organized, and he showed how teachers evaluated other teachers’ postings on KlasCement. An interesting feature was the scores that all teachers could give to other teachers’ contribution, with quite positive results.

The extensive presentation can be seen at:

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/813.pdf

Astrid Leeb, EduHi

Astrid gave a short history of Austria’s largest educational repository “Education Highway”. EduHi started back in 1996 and consist of over 80.000 items divided on 39 sub portals. Some of the contributing success factors have been that it was a teacher to teacher project, it was flexible and it had different approaches to content. But as the project has developed and grown very large, new maintenance problems are facing the “Education Highway”: Exchange with other repositories is difficult, it is increasingly difficult to manage and to communicate with users and many items, scripts and tables has to be changed.

In version 2.0 for the “EduHi” the challenge is to focus more on quality not quantity, to enhance exchange possibilities with other repositories and to have improved connectivity between repositories and LMS.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/821.ppt

Silvia Panzavolta and Antonella Turchi, ANSAS/Indire

Antonella and Silvia gave the background for GOLD, a repository functioning for now 10 years. GOLD targets all kind of professionals in the school system and all levels. Contributors to the GOLD database are teachers, who actually get funding for writing material, and all material is screened by teachers.

The descriptors for the GOLD-repository have been set up by Indire and have been adopted by several other national repositories - as well as the largest EU repository, Learning Resource Exchange for Schools. The rights of the material is managed through the Creative Commons License - and teachers guarantee for what they are uploading.

Silvia and Antonella were proud to tell that the GOLD project had been mentioned in a Florence University – Faculty of social sciences - study as one of the 4 best projects in the public administration sector in Italy.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/827.ppt

Rosa María Gómez de Regil, CNDP

Rosa María presented the CNDP - and referred to an interesting experiment with Secondary schools digital textbook experiment. The objectives of the experiment were to decrease weight of the schoolbags, to propose innovative digital resources and to develop the use of ICT in the classroom. 69 secondary schools with VLE’s and digital resources were involved in the project for the 11 – 12 years old classes. All in all 15.000 pupils and 800 teachers were engaged in the project that was aimed for French and History textbooks

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/814.ppt

Overview of the CNDP organization.

Jose Moura Carvalho, DGIDC

Jose Moura referred to the state of the situation in Portugal, where “Portal des Escolas” is the official school portal. He was not content with the situation as the portal was not well known among the teachers, and as a result of this a dissemination campaign was launched as well as a Creative Commons campaign.

There was still progress on expanding the repository with the adding of 1,500,000 scanned pages of newspapers and magazines from 1910-2010 as well as approx. 500 educational video clips produced by different TV stations.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/835.pptx

Kati Clements, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

As a partner in European Schoolnet’s ASPECT project, University of Jyväskylä, have been testing the teachers’ experiences with the content packaging standards: SCORM specification by ADL, and the IMS Common Cartridge specification. Questions raised:

• Are the current implementations of these standards too difficult for teachers to use?
• Can the teachers see benefits in using packaged content?
• Are the standards interoperable with LMSs like Moodle?

The initial results show that almost 100 % of the teachers said that if high quality educational resources were available in either SCORM or Common Cartridge format, they would use them. However, the participating teachers are above average ICT-teachers so it is hard to draw a general conclusion. Furthermore Kati found that the teachers still need more training.

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/817.ppt

Interface preferences: When using SCORM in Moodle it is much more suitable for the learning situation than viewing web-pages.

Asta Buineviciute, ITC

Asta gave a brief presentation of the in the ASPECT project in Lithuania. According to Asta already 95 % of the teachers use ICT, so it is important to have repositories – in Lithuania they have as well material from publishers as from other teachers.

The plan for the future is to improve the quality of the repositories through funding from the European Social Fund and by revising all non commercial learning objects in Lithuania (in all databases).

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/815.ppt

In the ASPECT project it was especially in Biology that material was developed – only a small fraction of these learning objects was published under CC format.

Andrew Kitchen, Becta

Andrew described the situation of Becta after the new UK-government in May 2010 decided to close the organization. There will be different scenarios for the assets in Becta:

• Some will not be available due to functions transferring from Becta to other Government bodies
• Some will be sold
• Some will be undergo a non-fee based transfer of ownership
• Some will be charitably donated
• It is expected the majority of electronic assets will be released as either Creative Commons or Crown Copyright and archived, where none of the above apply.

He mentioned three projects, where the situation was as follows:

• The Interactive Whiteboard Common File format - interest from government in continuing this project
• Content ECO-system - funding has stopped
• IPR and copyright - unclear what will happen

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/818.ppt

Fred de Vries, Share.TEC

Fred referred to the Share.TEC project - Sharing Digital Resources in the Teacher Education Community. A consortium of 8 institutions was behind the project with the aim of getting teacher educators more easy access to resources. The project is now in its final year and Share.TEC is an associate member to EdReNe.

Fred told about the current status of Share.TEC, which is reflected in the slide from the presentation:

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/816.ppt

Patrick Coffey, NCTE

www.scoilnet.ie

Main access route to resources is through the Resource Finder. The Resource Finder pulls from a single database but the access points to it are tailored to meet specific audiences – teachers at primary level; teachers at second level; students at both levels. So, for example you get

Teachers First Level (Primary age 5-12) www.scoilnet.ie/TeachersFirstLevel.aspx
Students First Level www.scoilnet.ie/StudentsPrimary.aspx
Students Second Level (age 13-18) www.scoilnet.ie/StudentsPostPrimary.aspx

Students will also access resources through, what we term ‘themed pages’ like the one for Halloween www.scoilnet.ie/halloween_themepage.shtm

Within the last year Scoilnet has licensed the use of World Book Encyclopaedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In both cases access is ‘free’ to all Irish schools – verified by IP address. In addition teachers can access the online encyclopaedias from home once they register (with their Teaching Council number and school roll number).

Access to the encyclopaedias is through links on the home page www.scoilnet.ie/. However, for Encyclopaedia Britannica we have built a federated search to their content through the site search on Scoilnet. The results for Britannica appear in an additional tab – only visible through school IP addresses.

Scoilnet’s site search also pulls from the ‘Ask About Ireland’ repository. Also available at www.askaboutireland.ie. This is an initiative of libraries in Ireland and contains great primary source material.

Scoilnet’s site search also pulls from www.imagebank.ie a safe environment for children to access photos uploaded under a creative commons licence. This project has an emphasis on photos of places and spaces with an Irish interest.

Within the last two months Scoilnet has also arranged for Irish schools to access the Ireland Collection on JSTOR.org. This links to over 75 academic journals and will be of interest to senior students undertaking research studies for History. See www.scoilnet.ie/irelandcollection.shtm

Peter Karlberg, Skolverket

Peter informed about the beta version of SOCH (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage), which was released in February 2009. It is a web service used to search and fetch data from any organization that holds information or pictures related to the Swedish cultural heritage.

SOCH functions as an exchange/aggregator where data from many local databases are made searchable and visible to the public and to the research community. Being a web service, it is up to the application developers to build the actual applications that exploit SOCH. One of the first applications built on SOCH is a mobile phone application showing ancient monuments on a map layer. A number of museums are also building applications on SOCH in order to make more than their own information available online.

http://www.ksamsok.se/in-english/

Foto: Gerhard Milstreu. CC (by-nc-nd)

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI•C

Leo mentioned that two reviewers are currently conducting the final review of the EdReNe project for the Commission. He expected that UNI•C’s response to the review will be quick, and that the Commission will also approve the final EdReNe financial statement this year.

He reminded members to update their part of the current status of European educational repositories

Andrew Kitchen, Becta

Andrew went through the proposal for “Europeana for Learning”, which a number of EdReNe members together with providers to Europeana had submitted to the EC for funding. The bid was in the framework of CIP ICT PSP call 4. As there was significant funding, more than 30m Euros for the Digital Libraries initiative, in enhancing/Aggregating content for Europeana, he found it to be a great opportunity to seek funding.

The proposers saw the EC call as an opportunity to also raise funding for sustaining the EdReNe network. Unfortunately the proposal did not go through this time, but Andrew was confident that there would be a great chance next time the opportunity came for sending a similar proposal, due to the following reasons:

• The commission were positive and constructive about the proposal’s concept.
• We knew all along that this proposal was put together in a rush and that a future opportunity would be more effectively written.
• Europeana are keen to ensure their content is used!
• The learning society is the ideal place for their content to be used in anger.
• Future calls will be more aligned to what was being proposed and therefore the severe risk will vanish….

https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/819.ppt