Engaging Users - Second Expert Workshop (WS 5.2)

This workshop took place at Hotel Husseren-les-Chateaux, Alsace, France, October 20^th–22^nd 2008.
The agenda for all expert workshops is settled on the basis of input from network members. During the second strategic seminar in Lisbon participants were asked to prioritize issues for this workshop. This list of issues will also serve as guidelines for producing the upcoming thematic synthesis report on Engagement of Producers and Users. The issues with highest priority for the second workshop addressing this theme were:

• My repository - the need for personalization (profiles; reviews; collections; automatic recommendations…)
• Building your own content from repository resources (allowing teachers to combine content from various producers)
• Analyzing repository use (statistics; identifying popular functions; interpreting search strings and results; user surveys; characterization of user types)
• Implementation of user generated metadata (evaluations; reviews; tagging; collaborative filtering; information on actual usage …)
• Ensuring ease of use (identifying/developing design patterns; usability; wizards …)

This second workshop on the Engagement of Users focused on presenting cases of how repositories currently approach the issues identified by network members as the most important to share experiences about (see agenda).

The five issues given the highest priorities during the second strategic seminar were thus taken as the basis for presenting different member repositories. These cases were subsequently part of the input for generating ideas and headings to structure the Thematic Synthesis Report on the Engagement of Users.

Plenum discussions followed presentations on: flexible curriculum sharing; teachers developing digital content across institutional boundaries; and managing quality control of user generated content.

Other group sessions focused on improvements and suggestions relating to the State of the Art report and the deliverable dealing with agreement templates relevant to repository owners. Part of the workshop was devoted to addressing the current state of health of educational repositories – describing the most profound ailments (by examining specific repository examples) and suggesting cures.

 

Tuesday, October 21st 2008
09.00	Project stuff - administration	Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI•C
09.30	Presentations of new member DGIDC – Ministry of education, Portugal	José Moura Carvalho, DGIDC
10.00	Group sessions The members discuss yesterday’s presented examples of good practice and elaborate on recommendations and solutions to the issues raised.	Tommy Byskov Lund, UNI•C
12.30	Lunch
13.30	Community power by building blended curriculums – a key to increased use of digital resources? Teachers developing digital content across institutional boundaries – why and how?	Henk Nijstad, Kennisnet
	JClic, Building a repository on the success of an authoring tool	Francesc Busquets, EAPC
	Managing quality of resources in repositories - User Created/Generated Content	Leonie Verhoeff, Kennisnet
15.00	Plenum/Group session: Updated version of the State of the Art report on educational repositories (deliverable of WS 3, due October 2008). Based on submitted amendments of national contribution members discuss the current version, suggesting improvements to the final version	Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI•C
17.00	Social break
20.00	Dinner

Wednesday, October 22nd 2008
09.00	Current State of Health of European Educational Repositories - As Diagnosed by the EdReNe Thematic Network . is the title of a presentation at Online Educa 2008… Based on an abstract by Leo Højsholt-Poulsen and the members’ state of the art contributions, members discuss and formulate indicators of state of health, diagnose samples and general trends, contamination and possible cures and medicine.	EdReNe members
11.00	Plenum introduction and group sessions: Templates for agreements between repositories and content owners/providers (deliverable of WS 5, due December 2008). The session will build upon the initial discussion at WS 3.2 and the samples of agreements submitted by the members	Tommy Byskov Lund and Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI•C
12.00	Looking and planning ahead Workshop evaluation	Tommy Byskov Lund, UNI•C
12.30	Lunch
14.00	Workshop finishes

16 of 23 founding members were represented. In addition four associated members participated – giving a total of 28 participants.

The workshop dealt with the prioritised themes in plenum presentations with subsequent discussions as well as in group sessions/discussions.

Repository case presentations
The first part of the workshop was a presentation from five members on how their repositories currently deal with the issues prioritised for this workshop.

The presentation showed that the current implementation does not include many personalization possibilities, but this is a major part of a planned upgrade. As EducaSources is a referatory the combination of content depends on the possibilities offered by the referenced websites. An important part of the added value of EducaSources is the current high quality of metadata, and even though plans are to allow users to have more “web 2.0 like” interaction with records in the next release, there is no intention of including user tagging as the basis for e.g. navigation.

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The presentation included concrete examples on current activities from Scoilnet that link to the prioritised issues. On the personalization issues, users can have a favourite collection, add items to a personal clipboard and set preferences corresponding to their subject areas. A new service – Scoilnet Maps – allows addition of user specific content. For building your own content Scoilnet offers different possibilities primarily consisting of an authoring tool (new service) and CC licensed assets.
The presentation also included examples on how statistics can be useful for knowing what content is requested and when to publish it, and also presented data from an Inspectorate report including evaluation of the use of Scoilnet.

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A presentation of the by far largest and most successful repository in Austria (part of portal). There are plans of implementing personalization in the form of profiles and personal collections. The statistics show what the most popular types of content are – and give a focus on the content to search for /have developed.
The most important keys to the success were presented as: Old but good - a portal that stays; from teachers for teachers; always try to adapt to different needs from subjects

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In Vetamix the focus to a large extent is on actually producing content. The presentation included a demonstration of the simple authoring tool (“lesson mixer”) allowing users to build and share personal collections, and showed other examples of user involvement such as possibilities for tagging, adding favourites to user profiles and discussion forums connected to repository resources.
The experiences gathered and statistics are still relatively limited as Vetamix was launched August 2008.

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This was a parallel presentation on how the issues were tackled in two different repositories launched almost ten years apart in time. A major difference is on the personalization side where the newest initiative (Materialeplatformen) allows for user to contribute and edit own materials and also offer services for exposing repository content via RSS or easily customized integration of search results in other web sites through JavaScript.
Content deposited by teachers is shared under CC licenses in an attempt to increase the possibilities for reuse – but it is still early in the process and different CC licenses are allowed. There is no present use of tagging or integrated community features.
The statistics presented showed examples of how knowledge of user behaviour can lead to “quick wins” when developing new functionality.

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The development of a content repository was presented as an important aspect of the ambitious Technological Plan for Education. The actual implementation will begin November 2008. The repository will hold metadata about both commercial and non-commercial content and include the possibility of depositing non-commercial content. As quality content is a priority a model for review of both commercial and user generated content has been generated. One aspect of this is allowing users to tag and review user contributed content.

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As input for the discussion on why the use of digital resources is so relatively limited, Henk Nijstad presented the idea of sharing not only digital content but also focus more on sharing the experiences of actually using it. The suggestion is that the most important blocking issue for increased use of digital learning materials is the fact that it is much easier to use traditional text books as compared to “visualising” how the same coverage of all curriculum aspects could be done by including digital materials. But as some teachers actually build up “flexible curriculums” combining different resources in interesting ways how can we help share these good examples in ways that will allow others to easily get started doing this on their own?

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In the Netherlands the national association of secondary schools have initiated a project on developing their own digital content. They have set aside around 10% of the budget normally used for buying text books to producing content. The main motivation for this is the cost, quality and lack of flexibility of existing publisher produced materials. Around 100 schools participate in the project. All content will be produced using an online SCORM authoring tool and stored in a repository for tagging and remixing by other users.

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The free software JClic allows for easy production of interactive platform-independent learning resources. As the community around the tool started to produce content the need for sharing and adapting was met by initiating a repository. This repository ClicZone today hosts more than 1.000 projects and 120.000 activities in a number of different languages, all shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
The presentation also included a new project – Virtual Notebooks – which allows teachers to create online “notebooks”. The intention is to help teachers from any area and level to create – and share - didactic multimedia resources which will allow them to evaluate their students’ progress. Both of these authoring tools were shown to integrate with Moodle.

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Focusing on user generated content leaves you with the problem of either a heavy burden on central quality control or the risk of disappointing users when they find low quality content. Based on a concrete example from a repository which suffered from quite a lot of published materials produced just for the purpose of testing the system, Leonie Verhoeff initiated a discussion on how to best attack this problem.
No absolute consensus was reached but ideas (and examples) on automated checks and allowing for easy removal/alerting by end users were discussed.

The coordinator gave the traditional update on project administrative issues (finances, web site updates, and progress). He scheduled the work of the next year and initiated the organisation of the forthcoming three events in the first half year of 2009.
He also noticed that EdReNe must prepare an accumulated financial statement covering years 1+2, May 2007 - April 2009. In order to prepare this, by the end of the 2008 fiscal year UNI-C will produce a financial overview corresponding to UNI-C’s accounting system. It is important that members fill the financial forms provided by the Commission, when they request reimbursement of costs.
A brief informal evaluation session concluded the workshop – and pointed out tasks and expected contributions from members in the near future.

The first group session focused on the preparation of the thematic synthesis report on Engaging users. Participants selected which of the prioritised themes they would prefer to elaborate on, and were placed in groups according to this. Groups were then asked to further describe the issues they would want information on when initiating or further developing a repository in order to make the report as valuable as possible. This was done by expanding the existing brief description and qualifying the type of data needed/preferred (for example quantitative data; case descriptions; screen shots; list of current implementations etc.).Groups were also asked to suggest which good practice already had been presented / existed within the network as suggestions for case descriptions. Each group uploaded their notes and suggestions to the Members Zone to have them available for contacting individual members and producing a draft of the thematic synthesis report prior to the next workshop in this series.

A group session was set aside for reading and commenting on the updated country sections of the State of the Art report on educational repositories. The goal of this session was twofold: to make sure all present members had the opportunity to comment on other country contributions, and to suggest improvements for which general trends we should focus on and whether additional questions should be included in the repository profile survey that was circulated prior to the workshop. The intention is to keep this survey updated and expand it with profiles of repositories outside the network as well when feasible.
A concrete suggestion from the subsequent discussion was to have “My ideal repository” as a theme for the concluding workshop in this series.

Participants were grouped and asked to identify indicators of the health state of repositories, examine patients in the form of a repository represented by a group member, and suggest cures for any ailments identified.
The discussions were subsequently presented by the groups and taken as input for a presentation to be done at Online Educa 2008 (by Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI-C) under the same heading as the group session.

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The final group session was intended to further build upon the discussion initiated at WS 3.2 on the form of the deliverable concerning agreement templates for use by repository owners (D5.5). Due to time constraints (previous group presentations exceeded the time slot originally expected) this session primarily consisted of a confirmation of the suggested form and content, as the agreement examples provided by members prior to this workshop did not mandate any changes:

• Produce materials that the network need (refer to priorities from surveys)
• Produce information that does not exist already (refer to it, including collected examples)
• Make a general section with summaries, advice and useful extracts and samples, and collect concrete examples to be in an annex