LRE

In this section you find the latest news and events related to the Learning Resource Exchange.

Open Educational Resources Rubrics published by Achieve, USA

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for increasing equity and access to high-quality K–12 education. In the United States, state education agencies now have offices devoted to identifying and using OERs and other digital resources in their states. To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community.

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LRE infrastructure and usability in a spotlight

The LRE's infrastructure and usability features are the subject of an article in the latest issue of the Learning Technology newsletter of the IEEE Computer Society. The special issue of the IEEE Learning Technology newsletter is focused on the domain of Standards and Specifications for Learning Technologies. It gathers eight articles on different topics within the standardization area, all of them by European experts in this field. The article "ASPECT: Learning Specifications at Work" has been written by David Massart and Elena Shulman from European Schoolnet.

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LRE attracting the attention of Spanish speaking pedagogues

The article published on the Eroski Consumer website has information about the work of eQNet on Travel Well criteria as well as a description of high quality learning resource  collections recently added to the LRE based on the recommendations of eQNet teachers.

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Open Educational Quality Initiative (OPAL) Consultative Group Meetings

UNESCO and the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (EFQUEL) have invited representatives of organizations working with quality, OER and educational policy to attend the first 2011 meeting of the Open Educational Quality Initiative (OPAL) Consultative Group. The meeting will be held online on Wednesday 25 May at 13.00 Central European Time, and repeated at 13.00 Pacific Time on Monday 30 May.

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Data on how learning resources are searched and used can help portals

The eQNet project is interested in how users perceive and use learning resources that "travel well". As the great potential of learning resource lies in their reuse, facilitating such cross-context use becomes important. In the eQNet project, among other things, we are looking at how users’ digital traces can be used to enhance cross-context discovery and identification of “travel well” learning resources. For this purpose, European Schoolnet (through the eQNet project) took part in the dataTEL initiative in September 2010. The dataset contains anonymous information on how users bookmark and rate resources on the LRE portal. The dataset thus allows (anonymous) tracking of the users' interests on “travel well” resources, information which can be used to create better search features for "travel well" resources.

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ASPECT Strategic Seminar on Educational Publishing Futures - 17-18 Feb 2011

Over two days, this strategic seminar provided a platform where Ministries of Education, publishers and ICT vendors could discuss the future of educational publishing and digital content for schools. There presentations are now available on the ASPECT website.

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Plugfest: Building Interoperability Across Metadata Application Profiles, 18 January 2011

The purpose of this Plugfest is to bring together technical teams to explore issues and techniques related to the conversion of one application profile to another. First, tools for automating metadata crosswalks will be demonstrated, including the ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education and the ASPECT transformer service. In the second part of the day, participants will present samples of their metadata and application profiles.

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Article: Metadata for learning materials: An overview of existing standards and current developments

An article written by Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell provides an overview of specifications and standards for metadata relating to learning materials. The article is structured to present first the currently established metadata schemas in use today (specifically the IEEE LOM and Dublin Core metadata), then to examine current developments and activities before looking at what might be the future challenges. The examination of current developments and activities highlights the increasingly recognized importance of metadata schema that describe what have in the past been thought of as secondary aspects of learning materials (for example who uses them and what for), and the importance of alternative approaches to structured metadata for resource description.

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Digital Resources that "travel well" - Workshop for eTwinning teachers 13 November 2010

One of the teachers' workshops in the eTwinning Professional Development Workshop on 13 November 2010 in Helsinki was about the use of digital resources by teachers. The eQNet partners ran this workshop and asked "Can digital learning resources be used across borders?".

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Norwegian quality criteria for digital learning resources published

The Norwegian "Senter for IKT i utdanningen" has published "Quality criteria for digital learning resources". The document specifies guidelines for the evaluation of the quality of digital learning resources (DLR). The purpose of these criteria is to help ensure that digital learning resources used in Norwegian primary and lower secondary education are of sufficient quality.

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Interviewing teachers at the ASPECT Summer School

In May 2010, the ASPECT Summer School gathered 40 teachers from across Europe to learn about content packaging and integration of resources into learning platforms. We interviewed several teachers to know what they think about content standards, digital learning resources and using these in their day-to-day teaching. Find out here what they said!

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SE@M 2010 - Workshop presentations and proceedings available

SE@M 2010, the 4th International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials was held on 27-28 September 2010 in Barcelona in coordination with EC-TEL 2010. The main goal of this international workshop was to offer a forum where researchers and practitioners discussed theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and shared the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for exchanging and describing learning content. The conference proceedings and presentations are now available.

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Travel well: how to share and reuse educational resources across borders?

What makes some educational resources more useful for different cultural and linguistic contexts? This is a difficult question to answer but, in a number of its projects, European Schoolnet has found that some resources in its Learning Resource Exchange have the potential to “travel well” and can be used cross-border in different educational contexts. Now we are trying to define “travel well” quality criteria so that Ministries of Education and other LRE content partners can more easily identify those resources that can be easily shared and reused by teachers and learners across Europe.

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