Learning Portals in practice: The case of the Organic.Edunet Web portal.
Hatzakis Ilias,
Project Manager, GRNETe-mail: [email protected]
• The general idea of open learning networks of digital educational repositories and the impact to all educational levels
• The case of the ORGANIC EDUNET project
• A learning portal in practice: Practical issues for the targeted communities
Fundamental principlesThe Universal Library – Public Agora– A contribution to democracy– A human right– A fair return to the tax payer– Access to original data– A means to improve the knowledge
chaotic data production/ gigantic data volume
changing knowledge ecosystem/ new roles/ profitable value added services
open access movement
Open accessOpen source
Open dataOER
learning object
"any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training"
ΙΕΕΕ Learning Technology Standards Committee (2002)
learning object
"any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training“
+ metadata describing this use
Publisher
Date Catalog
SubjectID
AuthorTitle
metadata
educational metadata
definitions• digital repository: system for the
storage, location and retrieval of digital resources
• digital learning repository (DLR):–nature of resources or their description
reflects an interest of use in an educational context
Holden C., “From Local Challenges to a Global Community: Learning Repositories Summit”, Academic ADL Co-Lab, 2003
networks of repositories
• learning repository federations– interconnecting learning
repositories– facilitate metadata exchange–allow searching throughout
whole network
required: networked learning repositories
problem to solve: metadata polymorphy
• Achieves interoperability between the digital collections of Organic Agriculture and Agroecology content that
producers in various countries have developed, • Facilitates publication, access, and use of this content in
multilingual learning contexts through a single reference point (the Web portal).
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rationale irreversible damage done to the environment by current
agricultural practices soil and water pollution depletion of natural resources destruction of delicate ecosystems
Organic Agriculture (OA) & Agroecology (AE) as alternative approaches
safer agricultural & food products environmentally sound production
“…need for actions supporting the training and education of all stakeholders related to OA…”
EU Action Plan for Organic Food & Farming, 2004
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need systematic collection and
categorisation of learning resources related to OA and AE
integrating online environment increase use and reuse
study & assessment of usage scenarios in the context of formal educational
programs
http://www.organic-edunet.eu 15/56
Objectives 1. support stakeholders producing content about OA & AE
– describe according to multilingual, standard-complying metadata – publish in online federation of learning repositories
2. deploy a multilingual online environment on top of the online federation of repositories
– to facilitate end-users’ search, retrieval, access and use of learning resources
3. study educational scenarios to support the teaching of OA & AE relevant topics
– use Organic.Edunet Web portal to find learning resources in the repositories
4. involve various schools & universities to evaluate project results– focused pilot trials within Organic.Edunet partner institutions– open validation events within Organic.Edunet affiliated institutions and dynamic
users
5. create organisational structures to support the sustainability of project results– reinforce the cooperation of stakeholders in the OA & AE content area
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targeted users tomorrow’s consumers: highschool
children to be familiarized with concepts &
benefits of OA & AE tomorrow’s professionals: students
of agricultural universities to be educated about methods and
practices of OA & AE
THE PORTAL
• Organic.Edunet Web portalhttp://www.organic-edunet.eu
• Provides access to 11,000 digital learning resources from 11 digital repositories
(more to come soon!)
WHAT’s IN THERE? • High quality multimedia/ multilingual training
content on OA, AE, certified by the community
• WHO? – FAO– Norwegian University of Life Sciences – European Network of Organic Agriculture Teachers (ENOAT)– University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Bucharest– Corvinus University of Budapest (BCE) and the Association for Hungarian Organic Farming (MOGERT).– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Agricultural University of Athens– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Estonian University of Life Sciences– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Bundesministerium fur Land- Austria– Sociedad Espanola de Agricultura Ecologica (SEAE) and the Centro di Investigacion y Formacion de
Agricultura Ecologica y Desarrolo Rural (CIFAED), Spain
• AFFILIATE PARTNERS (82)• Open/ new collections:
– The “slow food” movement– WWF
- EU-funded initiatives
- public or private not-for-
profit- organisations
- agricultural publishing
houses
- agricultural universities &
institutes
- rural schools & teachers
Interoperable
and multilingual
metadata/
OAI-PMH
Main menu
Login to your account
Create a new account or manage access problems
Review portal’s stats
Language selection
Shortcut to text based search
Shortcut to semantic search
Browse resources
Home Page
Organic.Edunet Web portal satisfaction survey
Links to most recent/popular/viewed resources
Panel for social activities (rating/reviewing history)
Short presentation of the featured resource, dynamically selected
Main links about guidelines on finding and contributing resources
Home Page
http://www.organic-edunet.eu 21/67
available learning resources
Organic.Edunet portal stats*
2200 registered users almost 11.000 available resources 11 institutional collections so far More than 44.000 visits 182.300 page views
≈11.000/month , >360 per day almost 34.000 unique visitors 75% new visitors / 27% direct traffic
*01/01/2010 -15/05/2011
educational scenariosavailable through the
portal
educational aim
tested & revised handbooks for teachers on organic scenarios
introducing OA & AE topics in curriculum
design of learning activities using content
process for adaptation of existing scenarios/content in other countries & contexts
university scenario (3/3)
school scenario (3/3)
pedagogy
• handbook for scenario implementation at school level
http://confolio.vm.grnet.gr/scam/6/resource/285
• handbook for scenario implementationat university level
http://oe.confolio.org/scam/34/resource/296
How to contribute resources?
Individual users contribute through participation in one of the user communities that have been taken under the umbrella of Organic.Edunet. These communities use the Organic.Edunet Repository Tool in order to set up their working space in their own language, upload and share their resources with their peers, and connect this working space with the Organic.Edunet federation. Examples of existing user communities are the Greek Rural Schools’ Community (that connects teachers from Greek rural schools that are interested in using the school’s organic garden as a teaching/learning aid) and the AGROASIS Community (that connects university teachers of Organic Agriculture that are located in Nordic countries). In order for the community’s educational resources to be made available through the Organic.Edunet portal, the community needs to adopt and follow some minimum Quality Assurance procedure. Here you can find more information on how to join an existing community or create a new one.
Organisations or initiatives contribute through the connection (federation) of their institutional collections with the rest of the Organic.Edunet ones. These collections may either use the Organic.Edunet Repository Tool to set up a learning repository and organize their resources, or can use their own repository/database systems and make their metadata available through the Open Access Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Examples of existing institutional collections that are connected to Organic.Edunet are the ones of the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) and of the ECOLOGICA Association. In order for an institution to make its collection of resources available through the Organic.Edunet portal, they should follow a publicly available Quality Assurance procedure that is compliant to the Organic.Edunet requirements. Here you can find more information on how to connect an institutional collection.
How to connect yoursThere are two different ways of integrating new repositories into the Organic.Edunet federation.
• If the institution interested in integrating its repository already has an existing repository with support for OAI-PMH (with support for IEEE LOM format) AND the learning resources stored in it have an Application Profile equivalent to the one set up in Organic.Edunet, THEN there is only one step: Write an email to Web Portal responsible person (info [at] organicedunet [dot] eu) to agree on the parameters of the harvesting process:– URL– Port– Set– Date interval
• If the institution repository does not support OAI-PMH OR the Application Profile is not equivalent to the one installed in Organic.Edunet, THEN it is mandatory the installation of the confolio tool. After the installation of confolio, write an email to Web Portal responsible person (info [at] organicedunet [dot] eu) to agree on the parameters of the harvesting process:– URL– Port– Set– Date interval