EdReNe – Educational Repositories Network

On the agenda

Speaker

Opening Keynote

Presentation of CNDP

Patrick Dion, General Director, CNDP

Session 1: Educational repositories strategies: with a focus on repositories containing free and commercial content

French perspectives on educational repositories:

Digital Rural Schools Plan & Digital Resources Checks Plan

The national French context for ICT in education prioritizes e.g. an increase in the use of ICT in education, and sharing and disseminating educational resources.

Educational repositories containing free institutional resources, supported by a national resources sharing system.

Éducasources; 11700 digital educational resources

Caren; 510 free digital resources

Sialle; 250 titles open source

Primtice;1000 digital educational scenarios for primary teachers

Edubases; 20 subject repositories with 16000 teaching scenarios (secondary school level)

Repositories containing commercial resources.

Digital Rural Schools Catalog (ENR – École Numérique Rurale)

Digital Schools Checks Catalog (CCR – Catalogue Chèques Ressources)

Project figures: 2009-2011, 67 M€, 6700 primary schools (small villages), 32 educational publishers, 550 digital resources

Henri Kighelman, Rosa María Gómez de Regil, CNDP

Corrélyce: Open Catalog for Educational Digital Resources in Provence-Alpes-Côtes d'Azur region:

Isabelle Bréda, CRDP Aix-Marseille

Mixing open, own & commercial content

In program ECK2  (The Educational Content Chain), which is sponsored by the Ministry of Education in 2011(-2012), the partners SLO, Kennisnet and the Educational Publishers Association (de GEU) work together on 9 projects: Exchange of learning results and assessments, UPI (unique & persistent id) for learning objects and metadata, Distribution & Access (ordering, distribution, access, use, SSO, payments, identification, user profiles, licensing etc.), Principles and architecture, Vocabularies, and a project to facilitate the publishers to use NL LOM metadata & relevant vocabularies for describing their catalogue material and deliver via OAI PMH.

The project 'mixing open commercial learning content' has the ambition is to allow and enable that teachers can easily mix the publisher’s (digital) textbook with other learning objects. This is what many teachers ask for.

Henk Nijstad, Kennisnet

Session 2: Repositories and initiatives with perspectives on mobile devices

The iTunes U Space is a pilot project with 500 audio, video and pdf resources published by the SCEREN CNDP, for teachers of primary and secondary schools. The objective is to enhance and enlarge the corporate image of CNDP as a public publisher, distribute existing digital content using a different media, propose content for mobile devices, and to change management of the production chain.

Arthur Roussel, Rosa Maria Gómez de Regil, CNDP

The Mobile Learning Resource Exchange (mLRE) is an extension of the European Schoolnet’s Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) in order to make mobile Learning Resources (MLR) and ePUB content from a variety of providers easily discoverable and retrievable by teachers and pupils equipped with mobile devices. The ambition is to create the first international educational portal accessible from mobile devices where teachers can search, evaluate and retrieve mobile learning resources.

David Massart, European Schoolnet

MetaPlus: A solution to better search results?

The Meta Plus is a metadata editing tool that allows you to add extra metadata to (digital) learning objects. The feature is necessary because of poor existing metadata, new specific metadata may be needed, and the learning object may be interesting for other subject(s) or learning goals than originally foreseen.

It is a service from Kennisnet, live since September 2011, and the next step is to integrate MetaPlus with Wikiwijs.

Leonie Verhoeff, Kennisnet

Session 3: Repositories with resources for special education needs

The repository part of EUN’s new SENNET project

The EUN is to launch the SENNET network to undertake research in the area of SEN (Special Education Needs) in schools, to explore and document new learning environments integrating learners with SEN, and to improve the supply of professional development resources on SEN at EU level. In its role as leader of the work of implementation - Improving access of learners with SEN to digital resources-,UNI•C will draw upon the EdReNe network to investigate current status, and to improve the availability and access to online resources to support learners with SEN.

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI-C

L'école pour tous: Educational Resources for Special Education Needs

L'école pour tous is a website for teachers and parents containing validated and specialized resources (200 educational resources and 600 web pages) for special education needs.

Rosa María Gómez de Regil, CNDP

Session 4: News on European projects

iTEC, LRE for schools, eQNet, European standards

The Learning Resource Exchange for schools has been streamlined focusing on a smaller number of high quality resources from several repositoires/ providers and tagged according to The LRE Metadata Application Profile.

This summer in the eQNet project teachers recommended travel well (TW) collections from a number of countries, the LRE staff reviewed the collections and harvested collections when possible. These resources are grouped in the LRE. The result is high quality collections in the LRE. See also eQNet Travel Well criteria.

iTEC - Designing the future classroom is a major EUN-driven development- and pilot project, which aims at making the technical components (people, tools, services and content) required by the developed learning scenarios, interoperable and discoverable, so that teachers can more easily select and combine relevant components tailored to the future classroom scenario of their choice. The scenarios will be piloted by more than 1000 classes in many European countries.

David Massart, European Schoolnet

Session 5: Curriculum mapping news & projects

Building a semantic vocabulary framework for educational repositories

Vocabularies are useful for Labelling learning resources, Searching and finding

Interoperability between educational collections (50+), Data exchange between schools and government, Structuring content in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Monitoring learners, and Data exchange test results. However, how do we deal with the meaning of terms in vocabularies and inconsistency in vocabulairies? What about related experiences, research? A way forward may be semantic vocabularies.

Allard Strijker, SLO

Controlled Vocabulaires Management in the Semantic Web Perspective

Sceren are working on controlled vocabularies in three areas: Indexing languages, Query language, and The special case of nomenclatures.

Indexing languages is facilitated by the thesaurus MOTBIS and other specialized thesauri. As query language they use OTAREN for retrieval of information in a number of thesauri. There is an issue in choosing type of language when selecting the proper nomenclature describing a metadata profile. ISO 25964-1 is adopted as the new standard for managing vocabularies. Each concept is to be described by terms and relationships.

Laëtitia Cordeau, CNDP

Session 6: News from members and participants

Repository news from Denmark

The Subject Infoguide with 10.000 recommended links has been transferred to Diigo taking advantage of this existing web 2.0 service.

More focus on presenting metadata from the national educational repository in local systems (LMSs etc.).

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI-C

German Repositories

New look of the German Eduserver (Deutscher Bildungsserver, DBS) with 30,000 educational metadata records.

FWU Mediathek with 4.400 films and sequences, picture galleries, worksheets and ineractive learning objects.

Suzanne Friz, FWU

News from Sweden

The Swedish government has launched a new ambitious strategy: The new Digital Agenda for Sweden - ICT in the service of people

Christina Szekely, Skolverket

Edutablettes project, France

Tablets are a new and emergent technology, a growing market.

Little is known about its uses in K-12 education… What the research says

First classroom experiments in France: 2010-11. National initiatives

The project’s goals are to gain insight on the actual uses of tablets in education, develop meaningful educational applications for tablets, gain expertise in R&D projects involving partners from different backgrounds, and to build up new publishing models in education.

Monica Macedo, Jean-Michel Perron, CNDP

Dominique Barlet, Nathalie Coudre,
Nadia Claude, CNED

News from Austria

On-going Cooperation between the Ministry of Education and Education Group, especially on the further Development of the subject oriented portals.

Austria fixed/fix standards for key subjects, and focus on allocation of metadata of content to these standards. They exchange resources with other Repositories, and focus on cooperation with the LRE.

Astrid Leeb, Education Group, BMUKK/ENIS

I like to share, Belgium

Klascement now has more than 67.000 active users, 200 new members every month, 5.000-7.000 unique visitors a day, More than 21.000 learning objects (45% documents, 17% sites, 15% multimedia, ), 35 new contributions every school day. Launched a new very simple user interface (English version). They also work with lesson plans and SEN resources. Like in other countries pending issues are wifi, eBooks, and Apps (smartphones L, tablets J).

Hans de Four, KlasCement

State of the art of educational repositories

All members are encouraged to update the national status descriptions to keep the value of the site high.

What’s Next

Next EdReNe seminar will be May or June 2012 in Lisbon, Portugal.

UNI-C & members

EdReNe board meeting Issues/decisions : Look for funding possibilities from 7thFP/LLL/Horizon, either for concrete projects involving a number of EdReNe members, or dedicated network funding for continuing/expanding EdReNe inviting research institutions and companies; arrange virtual meetings/events. Next seminar May or June 2012 in Lisbon, hosted by DGIDC.

Present: EUN, CNDP, i-zone, Kennisnet and UNI•C