Learning Portals in practice: The case of the Organic.Edunet Web portal.

Hatzakis Ilias,

Project Manager, GRNETe-mail: hatzakis@grnet.gr

• 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

Thank you

Hatzakis Ilias,

Project Manager, GRNET

e-mail: hatzakis@grnet.gr