European Schoolnet and Projects on Learning Resources

1. Seminar on Digital Educational Resources Quality Digital Educational Resources for Schools Hotel Olissipo Oriente, Parque das Nações, Lisbon 13 December 2008 European Schoolnet and Projects on Learning Resources

2. Network of 31 Ministries of Education in Europe What is EUN Dedicated to Support schools in bringing about the best use of technology in learning Promote the European dimension in schools and education Improve and raise the quality of education in Europe

3. Aims, audience & approach Stakeholders Target groups Ministries of Education Teachers, Pupils IT Industry and Suppliers School Leaders European Schoolnet European Commission Policy makers Schools Researchers Developers Experts

4. Services and Portals School services: • To answer three key aims of EUN • ICT in teaching and learning • European dimension in education • Develop new skills • School networking: • eTwinning, Spring Day in Europe • Maths Science and Technology • Portals on materials (xperimania.eun.org), sciences (xplora.org), energy (futurenergia.org) • Highlight best practice • eLearning Awards (eContent), Development Youth Prize (school competition)

5. AGV <--> MST coordinator

6. EUN and Learning Resources Calibrate Inspire Learning Resource Exchange MELT ASPECT Learning Resource Exchange and Interoperability: • Sharing digital resources in Europe • Identify resources that can travel well (across cultures and languages) • Several projects to achieve interoperability of systems and description of LOs: • Approximately 40,000 learning resources and over 100,000 learning assets via a beta version of the LRE

7. Calibrate Calibrate (CALIBRATING eLearning in Schools). Purpose: allow teachers to carry out searches across a federation of learning repositories supported by six Ministries of Education (Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia), develop and implement an open source collaborative ‘learning toolbox’ for schools and carry out research into new ways to improve the semantic interoperability of learning resource descriptions. In short, CALIBRATE is a multi-level project that will add value to the services provided by national educational content portals and improve the ability of schools to easily locate, access and use a wider and more diverse collection of learning resources at a European level.

8. A collaborative way of exchanging learning resources The key aim in CALIBRATE was to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools. In particular, the project: allowed teachers to perform ‘federated searches’ for learning resources in a network of linked content repositories. provided schools with an open source ‘learning toolbox’ - an environment that allows teachers and pupils to perform collaborative learning activities using both content developed by the schools themselves and resources found using the CALIBRATE system. carried out research and tested new approaches that could improve semantic interoperability related to the discovery and evaluation of learning resources. validated the CALIBRATE system and web portal in up to 100 schools. The main research objectives were to: explore how we relate the subject of a learning resource to a particular national curriculum and attempt to associate national curricula through knowledge representation techniques. develop a flexible, second-generation ‘brokerage system’ architecture that can be easily adopted by owners of learning content repositories. The CALIBRATE system will offer a set of services (e.g. federated searches, learning resource exchanges, digital rights management) that can be arbitrarily combined by each repository in the federation depending on its specific needs. develop a new open source toolbox for collaborative learning that will offer a rich feature set developed in concert with practicing teachers. The key aim in the project was to bring these research strands together. Calibrate

9. MELT MELT (Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching). Purpose: Across Europe, MoE and other providers of educational content are offering extensive catalogues and large repositories of online learning resources to schools. However, as the number of resources in these repositories continues to grow, educational budgets are struggling to cope with the increasing demand for better quality metadata that will enable teachers and learners to quickly and easily find the specific learning materials they need.

10. MELT The MELT Approach Using the existing technical architecture or ‘brokerage system’, developed in the earlier CELEBRATE project, a network of content repositories will be established so that teachers and learners can easily carry out ‘federated searches’ of the MELT content. MELT included three different approaches to creating new and better metadata: * Some MELT content was enriched with metadata by expert or trained indexers * Teachers provided with ‘folksonomy’ and ‘social tagging’ tools added their own metadata to MELT content they have used ‘

11. Inspire (Innovative Science Pedagogy in Research and Education). Purpose: challenge the lack of interest of students to start scientific studies and more widely to extend the supply of scientific specialists and to develop a scientific culture in European countries. INSPIRE

12. During 10 months Inspire will gather data to: Observe the impact of these new teaching methods on pupils and on their motivation. Analyse the pre-requisites to be defined for enabling teachers to integrate these new techniques in their pedagogy. Identify the critical success factors to be mastered at teacher and school level for the generalization of such practices. INSPIRE

13. ASPECT Aspect (Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content). Purpose: Technology providers and standards’ experts in the project work with content providers to develop best practice approaches to implementing standards for both educational content discovery and use. Content providers apply these best practice approaches to a critical mass of resources in the expanded LRE. These resources are then validated with up to 40 schools in four countries in order to determine how the implementation of standards and specifications in the project leads to greater usability of LRE content. Based on this practical implementation of standards, which will be independently evaluated, ASPECT partners will feed the project’s experience into pre-standardisation activities and run an extensive set of dissemination actions. The aim is to develop a unique co-operation framework for all stakeholders who will also benefit from a set of new support services that include: a LOR registry; Vocabulary Bank for Education; Application Profile registry; automatic translation service for LOM and content packaging formats; compliance testing; transformer services; and access to known interoperability issues.

14. ASPECT As a result of its work, the ASPECT project will have a strategic impact on pre-standardisation activities and the ability of partners to submit and support proposals to European and international standardisation bodies. Together with the CALIBRATE and MELT projects, ASPECT will also help European Schoolnet and its supporting 31 MoE and partners to implement its strategic development plan for the LRE and provide standards’ based, high quality learning resources both to schools in Europe and globally.

15. Inspire ??? Purpose: ??? During 10 months Inspire will gather data to: Observe ??? Analyse ??? Identify ??? INSPIRE

16. Students find Science classes boring and / or difficult INSPIRE Students more interested in Science + = Learning objects

17. Students find Science classes boring and / or difficult INSPIRE ? Students more interested in Science + = Learning objects

18. LO LO LO EUN and Learning Resources Inspire Calibrate Oct 05 – March 08 Dec 2007 – Dec 2009 LOs + = Learning Resource Exchange LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO ASPECT MELT Sep 08 – Feb 11 Oct 06 – Dec 08 LO LO LO LO LO LO LO LO

19. LRE for schools http://lreforschools.eun.org • open educational resources and assets from many different countries and providers, including 16 Ministries of Education • Many ~ 140 000 resources + assets

21. Learning Objects? Subjects? Ages? Types? Formats? Same in all countries? INSPIRE

22. INSPIRE – the team Austria Italy Lithuania Germany Spain Schools 5 5 37 20 10

23. INSPIRE - infrastructure inspire.eun.org ca.inspire.eun.org es.inspire.eun.org it.inspire.eun.org lt.inspire.eun.org de.inspire.eun.org forms How to use the LOs list of LOs

24. INSPIRE - forms Before After LO 1 LO 2 LO N ...

25. INSPIRE - LOs

26. INSPIRE – LO info page

27. INSPIRE - LO

29. INSPIRE - LO

30. INSPIRE - LO

31. INSPIRE - LO

32. INSPIRE - LO

33. INSPIRE - LO

34. INSPIRE results Summer 2009 Inspire Summer Academy

35. Obrigada! More information? Àgueda Gras-Velázquez, agueda.gras@eun.org Useful sites:www.eun.org – www.europeanschoolnet.org www.dyp2007.org – myeurope.eun.org – www.springday2008.net – eminent.eun.org – insight.eun.org – insafe.eun.org inspire.eun.org – www.etwinning.net – stella-science.eu – www.saferinternet.org – lre.eun.org – www.xplora.org – www.xperimania.net – www.futurenergia.org elearningawards.eun.org – aspect.eun.org http://lreforschools.eun.org