Aspect News for EdReNe seminar Copenhagen 7.10.2010

1. Aspect News for EdReNe seminar Copenhagen 7.10.2010 Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content Educational Resources Packaging Standards SCORM and IMS Common Cartridge - Users point of view Kati Clements1, Àgueda Gras-Velázquez2, Jan Pawlowski1 1. University of Jyväskylä, Finland 2. European Schoolnet, Belgium

2. How do the users feel about adoptions of standards? During 30months-lasting project Aspect several spesifications were tested with teachers: Metadata standards, content packaging standards... Problem of testing standards: Not testing the spesification, but the implementation to spesific tools.

3. SCORM spesification by ADL IMS Common Cartridge spesification 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 Testing content packaging standards

4. Pilot around Europe 44 Teachers from Belgium Portugal Lithuania Romania

5. Test set up • Task 1: Create a lesson plan in Moodle x 4: • 1) Using non-packaged content • 2) Using the entire SCORM • 3) Using an entire IMS Common Cartridge package • 4) Picking up parts from the IMS Common Cartridge package • Task 2: SCORM and IMS CC packages – • testing features

7. Tests set-up • Data gathered with mix-method approach, so results would complement each other. • Online Surveys after each task • Individual and group interviews with teachers • Observation • Critique: sample of teachers small (n=44) and slightly above average ICT users, ==> results ~ These results can only give indication. • We also used Moodle as well as Icodeon SCORM player & CC platform as a LMS tools, which narrows the results to these particular implementations

8. Interface preference

9. How easy of hard was it to create a lesson plan? Using…

11. Preference of use

12. Initial results • Teachers were generally very excited about the possibilities of IMS Common Cartridge • This was due to 2 issues: • Re-Use of materials in their on LMSs have become easier (In moodle, you can edit as you like, add, remove or alter – This is however the current implementation, if Moodle starts to support SCORM in a similar way, teachers would like that) • Icodeon CC platform’s functionality of being able to embed parts of the package into blogs, social media, web pages…

13. Users view on content packaging in general In most cases, a ready-made resource package is not directly suitable for their lessons. However, if it can be mildly altered, then it becomes useful Packages that you cannot modify can mainly be used only by learners (teachers described a case where they have to teach an entire new topic and first would have to learn it themselves) Content packaging comes most in use when repeating the same course many times in an LMS platform, not having to copy every small bit separate.

14. Would you use it? • Almost 100% of the teachers said that if high quality educational resources would be available in either SCORM or Common Cartridge format, they would use them BUT - these are above average teachers and they still need training.

15. Initial results from tests http://www.aspect-project.org/node/88

16. More coming soon, until then,... Send feedback/ask more.. Kati Clements (kati.clements@jyu.fi) Dr. Àgueda Gras-Velázquez (agueda.gras@eun.org)‏ Thank you!