Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045 OpenScienceResources: Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for Formal and Informal Science Education D-7.4 Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability approach (final version) Deliverable number D 7. 4 Dissemination level Public Delivery date April 25, 2012 Status Final Authors Kati Clements (JYU) Denis Kozlov (JYU) Jan Pawlowski (JYU) Eleftheria Tsourlidaki (EA) Sofoklies Sotiriou (EA) Nikitas Kastis (LF) Reviewers Jennifer Palumbo (ECSITE) This project is funded under the eContentplus programme, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.
Transcript
Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045
OpenScienceResources: Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for Formal and Informal Science Education D-7.4 Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability approach (final version)
Deliverable number D 7.4
Dissemination level Public
Delivery date April 25, 2012 Status Final
Authors
Kati Clements (JYU) Denis Kozlov (JYU) Jan Pawlowski (JYU) Eleftheria Tsourlidaki (EA)
Sofoklies Sotiriou (EA) Nikitas Kastis (LF)
Reviewers Jennifer Palumbo (ECSITE)
This project is funded under the eContentplus programme, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.
Executive Summary
In this document we describe the intermediate results and the refinement of the roadmapping approach of the OSR project. Roadmapping is a process of describing the decisions we have made for OSR approach - linking the standardized gathering experts’ views and best practices on the topics specifically examined within the project, in the wider framework of digital science education. This final version of the roadmap collects together all the work conducted over the three years of OSR project, based on validation as well as
the research done in the field by the consortium. The main result is a set of recommendations towards an improved science education content organization schema.
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................................................3
3. FINAL OSR ROADMAP.......................................................................................................................................6
EDUCATIONAL DESIGN ........................................................................................................................................................................................7 OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES ................................................................................................................................................................................7 EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS ................................................................................................................................................................................9 COMMUNITY BUILDING .................................................................................................................................................................................... 18 PDA AND MOBILE SUPPORT ........................................................................................................................................................................... 25
RESEARCH WORKSHOPS .................................................................................................................................................................................. 30 HIGHLIGHT EXPERIMENTATION CASE 1: .................................................................................................................................................... 31
Implementation of a school field trip with the use of mobile devices ......................................................................... 31 HIGHLIGHT EXPERIMENTATION CASE2: ..................................................................................................................................................... 34
Application of the Light Ray and Colour pathway with students activities in the rural school of Glafki . 34
ANNEX 1: SCIENCE LEARNING CONTENT VOCABULARY FOR THE “CLASSIFICATION” ELEMENT OF THE OSR EDUCATIONAL METADATA STRUCTURE.......................................................................................... 43
1. Introduction
The main goal of this deliverable is to describe how the Open Science resources (OSR) approach on its proposed content organization schema including the surrounding educational design and to envision the
future for standardized organization of open science resources. In this document we also give recommendation based on the lessons learned during our validation and experimentation with user groups, including formal and informal users. Overall, we see that OSR approach has brought together standards-driven (OSR IEEE LOM Application profile, OSR Pathways (IBSE-Model), Educational objectives (Bloom Taxonomy)) and user-driven perspectives (OSR Folksonomy, Educational value of the content) of
organizing open science resources.
The main objective of the Open Science Resources project’s roadmap is to propose guidelines that will help partners effectively organize digital objects from science centres and museums aimed at science
education; further, the roadmap aims to gather the results of the project together in a coherent way. OSR Roadmapping activities brought together the best practices rising from the OSR approach during the project and its outcomes validated through the work carried out within WP6, but also took into consideration specific results of interviews/envisioning sessions in research workshops with internal and external experts. We focus in particular on following areas Educational design, metadata of open science resources, Educational Pathways, Community building and Social tagging, PDA and mobile support, quality assurance. These activities together will form the recommendations and the OSR roadmap towards
a standardized Science Resources (re-) usability approach. This deliverable begins with an overview of Roadmapping methodologies and then describes in detail the specific approach which OSR followed, including the various experiments and validation procedures. At the end of this document, our recommendations for future of organizing open science resources have been collected together.
2. Roadmapping Approach
The OSR Roadmapping approach was described in D7.1, Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability approach (draft version). OSR Roadmapping process followed the steps
presented in figure1: 1. Forming the start-up picture, 2. envisioning phase (year 2 of the project and 3. future scenarios phase (year 3 of the project). The final 4. recommendations are set in this current
document.
Figure 1: OSR Roadmapping process. The current focus of the roadmapping is the future scenarios phase.
Future scenarios: Development of future scenarios and identification of critical elements needed to realize them. This also contains SWOT analysis and the role of OSR artefacts developed and
envisioning the next 3-5 years after the project ends.
The roadmapping task will bring together the results from the OSR project evaluated by the stakeholder groups of OSR and present recommendations for the future based on the best practices identified through
the project. Main methodologies behind the OSR roadmapping approach are described in the previous two versions of this deliverable. Summarizing the approach: At the beginning of the OSR project, the status of the content and technologies were described in the Description of Work. A critical amount of resources (educational and informal, varying from videos, images and text to web-based multimedia) was identified in museums’ and science centers’ repositories – however, these resources are not used to their full potential. The reason behind this is the lack of interoperability between repositories, the inefficiency of current content organization and metadata structures as well as multi-lingual issues. On the second year of OSR, research work was focusing on envisioning the changes still applicable throughout the project. The final roadmap is built upon where the intermediate roadmap left off. In D-7.1. the Draft version of this roadmap, we classified OSR artifacts are as follows: Educational resources organization - repositories (Portals)
• Search schemas, • Metadata,
• Translations, • Social tagging,
• PDA support,
• Pedagogical support,
• Virtual communities building Technologies that support sharing of the content to the repositories (Authoring tools)
• Metadata tool
• Pathway authoring tool
• Social tagging tool Science centre/museum visit enhanced with digital resources and technologies
• Scenarios of use for different stakeholder groups
• Educational design (Pre-visit, visit, post-visit) Quality assurance of the resources
• Community approach to quality: • Quality assurance by user-based mechanisms
• Quality assurance by automatic mechanisms
1 Big picture 2 Envisioning 3 Future 4
Recommendations
• Quality assurance by a quality team & trusted networks
However, in this document we clarify our focus on the main contributions of this project to highlight its
value in research. We will therefore modify our artifacts into following:
Educational resources organization (overall scope of the project) o Educational design (Pedagogical design and educational objectives) o Open science resources (Metadata) o Educational Pathways (Science centre/museum visit enhanced) o Community building (Social tagging) o PDA and mobile support o Quality assurance
In this document, we specify our approach into these artifact and each chapter contains also envisioned future scenarios for the artefacts risen based on our research activities and workshops. At the end of each chapter, we try to illustrate the roadmapping steps of OSR taken with each artifact with a picture (see figure 2). The idea is to summarize where we started to what action we took and which approaches we envision to be seen in the future of digital educational resources organization. At the end of this document, we have gathered together all the conclusions and recommendations for future developers and projects around educational resources organization.
Figure 2: General OSR Roadmapping approach
3. Final OSR Roadmap
In this chapter we present the OSR Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-) usability
approach. Our approach maps the choices for standardization with the users’ voices and from that derives our proposed content organization schema. The OSR project set out to explore the opportunities offered and challenges posed by the enrichment of science learning digital resources with standardised and social
educational metadata, as well as by the combination of science learning digital resources into learning activities modelled according to a standard, as part of an agenda focused on bridging formal and informal
science learning contexts in order to make science learning opportunities more accessible and appealing to learners across the lifelong learning spectrum.
ARTEFACT
Educational design
The OSR Methodology is described in detail in the “OSR Educational Design” which was the result of a dialogic process between existing knowledge in the fields covered (formal and informal science learning, educational metadata and social tagging), and the concepts and objectives of the OSR project. The aim of this dialogue was to identify the state-of-the-art and gradually explore and highlight significant opportunities and challenges for innovation enabling a more effective exploitation of the rich but disperse educational content available in the digital repositories of science museums and centres across Europe.
Existing knowledge and the state-of-the-art were captured through literature review, as well as through an extensive consultation process within the OSR consortium. The literature review covered diverse fields,
including formal and informal science learning in the context of the Contextualised Model of Learning, Inquiry-Based Learning, and Resource-Based Learning, as well as the characterisation of digital learning
content with standardised educational metadata and user-contributed (social) metadata, and the design of learning experiences according to contemporary standards for modelling learning activities. Beyond the literature review, consultation within the OSR consortium provided clear insights into the trends, opportunities and challenges arising. By encouraging and facilitating the exchange between at least three distinct ‘worlds’ (those of formal school education, informal science learning facilitated by
science museums/centres, and research and applications in areas connected with educational metadata and the modelling of learning activities), the OSR Educational Design made effective use of the rich and
diverse expertise represented in the project to reflect on the state-of the-art and identify the emerging challenges. The main contributions of the project are:
a) the OSR standard-based educational metadata structure (‘OSR IEEE LOM Application Profile’, or simply ‘OSR Application Profile’); b) flexible schemes for the combination of digital resources into wider meaningful learning experiences appropriate for the user and context of use (‘OSR Educational Pathways’); c) an account of options and opportunities offered for the exploitation of the potential of social
tagging in the OSR project.
Open science resources
Educational science resources in OSR approach are meant by learning objects described with IEEE LOM
metadata which OSR adopted into our specific application profile. OSR IEEE LOM Application Profile: The structure of the OSR educational metadata
The structure of the OSR educational metadata was defined taking the form of the OSR Application Profile. More precisely, the OSR IEEE LOM application Profile has been developed following the methodology which is proposed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium and European Committee for Standardization (CEN/ISSS). In the light of the review of the IEEE LOM standard and the existing IEEE LOM Application Profiles, the project made the following points in connection with the OSR Application Profile:
• Subject Domain: In the context of the OSR project, the vocabulary for the Classification of the content was extended so as to cover the science curriculum. (Annex 1)
• Learning Resource Type: An extended vocabulary which was validated by the project partners was also proposed for the affective description of the learning resource type.
• Educational Objectives: the project team also proposed a vocabulary based on an adaptation of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives (and its revisions). It includes all three domains of learning as initially defined by Bloom, namely cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The inclusion of affective and psychomotor objectives next to the traditionally focused-upon cognitive objectives is seen as a contribution of the project to a more comprehensive approach to science education and informal learning that users of OSR were encouraged to recognise and materialise throughout the project. Based on the experiences gained through the interaction of the project team with users and teachers and science museum/centre staff, the number of vocabulary elements was reduced to four items per list, by merging certain elements of the original taxonomies. The OSR vocabulary, however, retains a clear relation to the original full length lists, so that its items can be directly linked to the elements of the Taxonomy, thus allowing for
interoperability with other content organisation systems that use the Taxonomy or other vocabularies based on it. Moreover, the analysis conducted also resulted in making available free-
text fields next to the selections of vocabulary where users are able to further define the educational objectives of the digital learning resources they annotate.
Future Scenario: Harvesting and semantic web approaches
To enable sustainability of OSR content and pathways, OSR developed our metadata application profile
within mind that it could be harvested by bigger federations of repositories. Connection was made to ARIADNE (http://www.ariadne-eu.org/) foundation which has a long line, well-known reputation in Europe. The ARIADNE Foundation was created to exploit and further develop the results of the previous European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula, which seems as a
powerful tool for bringing OSR content available for users also in the future. Harvesting means that our metadata will be available in portals built around the ARIADNE harvest engine (see Figure 3). The physical
learning objects will not move, but the metadata will link up to the OSR portal. This approach will increase the OSR content’s life span and use for communities outside OSR user base.
Figure 3: Integration – the example of the Ariadne foundation (modified from http://www.ariadne-eu.org/content/services) Furthermore, it is necessary to consider semantic web and peer to peer approaches – in the future, not all learning resources will be stored in repositories, search mechanisms will take semantic web resources into account. Thus, it should be considered how current repository solutions can be mapped / transferred
to semantic web solutions.
As a last aspect, it needs to be considered how metadata specifications develop, At the moment, the main specifications in the learning domain are IEEE LOM and – to some extent – Dublin Core. Currently, an
international standardization group ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 discusses new and more modular specifications “Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR). Currently, the framework is published as a standard (ISO/IEC
OSR
Repository
OSR Vocabulary
OSR Pathways
19788-1:20111), specific metadata categories (e.g. technical, educational) are under development. This
more modular and harmonized standard should be monitored and considered for future implementations. Future scenario: Curricula embedding
In OSR Research workshops, the issue of how OER fit into different curriculums around Europe was raised. There is an urgent need towards mapping of OER to various curriculums and research to overcome
the differences of curricula around Europe.
Educational Pathways
The characterization of science learning objects alone cannot generate adequate momentum for effective and sustainable exploitation of the rich content of digital repositories, unless this content can be accessed by the intended users in purpose-appropriate, meaningful ways. This challenge was addressed by the OSR project through the employment of the concept of Educational Pathways.
Figure 4. The concept behind the OSR educational p athways
The concept of Educational Pathways in OSR reflects the importance accorded by the project in
responding to the needs of the diverse communities of potential users through the OSR services. Thus, an Educational Pathway in the OSR project describes the organization and coordination of various individual science learning resources into a coherent plan so that they become a meaningful science learning activity for a specific user group (e.g. teachers, students, other museum visitors, etc.) in a specific context of use. In this sense, an OSR Educational Pathway is the concrete realization of a plan for a (sequence of) ‘Learning
Activity-/ies’ that could be modeled in accordance with the IMS Learning Design Specification, providing structured information about learning content, actors and interactions in and around the educational
environment of the OSR Portal. The phases of the OSR structured educational pathways are presented below:
Figure 5. Presentation of the phases of the OSR str uctured pathways
The OSR portal also offers the opportunity of creating open pathways, which in cases could be more appropriate for informal learning. The structure of the open pathways is similar to the structured pathways, as they too follow a three-part structure. The difference between structured and open pathways is that in open pathways the teaching phases are not predefined; they are open so that
contributors may fully adjust them to their needs. In the OSR approach, a Pathway is understood as a dynamic rather than static conceptual tool. Creators of
Pathways may revisit, revise and continually develop their Pathways, or even use Pathways created by others as a basis for creating their own new versions, in a process reflecting social learning as a course of
personal and communal gradual development in the learning community. Evaluation of pathways
The consortium of OSR launched a contest for the declaration of the best pathways. The contest run for
one month (February 2012) and users were asked to evaluate the pathways by adding educational objectives tags, based on the goals they believe each of them achieves.
Evaluation of pathways based on educational objectives
There are four different domains of educational objectives that describe the pathways (and the educational content) of the OSR portal. Out of these four, the cognitive domain of processes, the affective domain and the psychomotor domain have a cumulative hierarchical framework. Meaning that in each domain, each achievement requires achievement of the all the prior ones. Hence, the higher the achievement that is met in each domain, the higher the quality of the pathways in the specific domain. As each domain has different achievements, we have attributed a value to each of them so as to produce a
respective diagram based on the following table.
Table 1
List of achievements per domain
Value
Cognitive
Domain (Process)
Cognitive
Domain (Knowledge)
Affective Domain Psychomotor Domain
1 to remember Factual to pay attention to imitate and try
2 to
understand Conceptual
to respond and
participate
to perform confidently
following instructions
3 to apply Procedural to recognise values
to perform independently, skilfully and precisely
4
to think
critically and creatively
Meta-cognitive
to form and follow a system of values
to adapt and perform creatively
Results based on educational objectives
Based on the analysis of the educational objectives of the pathways of the contest we have concluded to the 8 pathways that are considered to be the best pathways of the portal. The results of the analysis along
with the list of the eight best pathways are presented in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The results of the evaluation for the bes t pathways of the OSR portal based on the analysis of the educational objectives added by the users of the portal.
Based on their overall achievement in all 3 domains the pathways in order of achievement are:
Table 2 Final Ranking of the best educational pathways based on the educational objectives added by the users.
Ranking Pathway Name Average performance (out of 4)
1st place Πυκνότητα και Καταστάσεις Ύλης 3,6
2nd place The red sludge disaster in Hungary 3,4
3rd place Foucault's Pendulum 3,2
4th place Heureka Classics Pathway 3,0
5th place Organischer Kompost im Kreislauf der Natur 3,0
6th place The history of atom 2,8
7th place Na onda do som 2,4
8th place Biodiversidade: Este Peixe é mesmo Fresco? 2,3
0,0
1,0
2,0
3,0
4,0
5,0
Cognitive Domain(Process)
Affective Domain Psycomotor Domain
valu
e
Domain
Comparison of the Educational Objectives added by the Social taggers for the Best Pathways of OSR
Heureka Classics Pathway
Biodiversidade: Este Peixe é mesmoFresco?
Na onda do som
Foucault's Pendulum
Πυκνότητα και Καταστάσεις Ύλης
Organischer Kompost im Kreislauf derNatur
The history of atom
The red sludge disaster in Hungary
Table 3
The eight best pathways of the OSR portal based on the evaluation of the users
Pathway name URL
Πυκνότητα και Καταστάσεις Ύλης (Density and states of matter)
http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/95782
The final selection of the eight best pathways is also in accordance with the rating based on the starring system and the internal contest of the consortium. Evaluation of the content based on the analysis of Social Tags for Educational Objectives
To understand the tags, their semantics and usage, the project team analysed those in the usage context, in our case in museums and science centres. The analysis aims to study users and contributors evaluation of educational pathways using educational objectives. Through the metadata record, the contributors of educational content have the ability to set certain educational objectives on different domains which the content serves according to their own understanding. In the OSR portal the educational content may be described based on four domains of educational objectives based on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy: a) cognitive domain of process, b) cognitive domain of knowledge, c) affective domain and d) psychomotor domain (Table 4). The educational objectives help educators to evaluate the process of thinking and learning. All mentioned domains, decides the cognitive domain of knowledge have a cumulative hierarchical framework. In other words each achievement requires achievement of the prior skill or ability before the next (Forehand, 2005). For example, if an educator believes that an activity in the affective domain achieves in helping students “to recognise values” this automatically indicates that it also
helps them “to respond and participate” as well as “to pay attention”. Hence, the educational objectives set by the contributor of educational content and most importantly in the case of educational pathways
clearly reflect his/her overall evaluation of the content contributed. Likewise, all users of the OSR portal have the opportunity to set their own educational objectives on any content and educational pathway through the social tagging tool. Thus the OSR portal provides contributors with a clear view of how other users evaluate the content they contributed. Moreover, setting educational objectives through social tagging may also provide a more detailed and valuable evaluation of the content of the portal compared to
the starring system which is the standard practice of user-evaluation. In order to conduct the analysis, a value was attributed to each achievement of every domain according to their position in the hierarchy of
the domain as indicated below in table 4.
Table 4 List of achievements per domain and the attributed value to each of them
Value Cognitive Domain (Process)
Cognitive Domain (Knowledge)
Affective Domain
Psychomotor Domain
1 to remember Factual to pay attention to imitate and try
2 to understand Conceptual to respond and participate
to perform confidently following instructions
The red sludge disaster in Hungary http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/95783
Kompostierung in der Biolanlandwirtschaft und als Energiequelle
www.osrportal.eu/en/node/95787
The history of atom http://www.osrportal.eu/el/node/94512
Na onda do som – In the mood for sound http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/95936
Biodiversidade: Este Peixe é mesmo Fresco? – Biodiversity: is this fish really fresh?
http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/96035
3 to apply Procedural to recognise values
to perform
independently, skilfully and precisely
4 to think critically and creatively
Meta-cognitive
to form and follow a system of values
to adapt and perform creatively
For the analysis a set of pathways which had been tagged by at least 5 users were selected. For every pathway, the educational objectives social tags that were added were counted in, in order to produce a mean value for every domain. This mean value was than compared to the value given by the contributor. The results for all the pathways were then merged in order to produce an overall estimation about the evaluation of the pathways based on educational objectives. In Figure 7 the overall tagging behaviour of social taggers compared to the contributors of 30 pathways from the OSR portal is presented.
Figure 7. Overall comparison of the educational objectives ad ded by the contributors and the social taggers on 30 educational pathways
Considering that higher values (see Table 1) in the graph represent higher expected learning outcomes it is clear that there is a quite good agreement between the values allocated by the contributors and the social taggers. It also has to be noted that contributors are expecting higher outcomes at the cognitive domain for processes. The high values in all domains are in line with the fact that science centers and museums are usually connected with much significant Affective outcomes, while the field trips usually
appear to particularly support the building and strengthening of existing knowledge, rather than the development of new knowledge (Falk & Needham, 2011).
The above methodology shows a typical analysis of tagging processes 1) for quality assurance purposes and 2) for usage analysis. For quality assurance purposes, the results mean that tags which are used in a similar way by contributors and taggers can be used to improve search results (e.g. by weighted rankings). Secondly, it means that contributors and users seem to agree on potential usage scenarios. In order to test the user's bias when evaluating educational pathways an analysis was also conducted on
the behaviour of users who were acquainted with each other. The two cases analysed correspond to the groups of participants during one summer and one autumn five-day OSR training schools. As participants
were very well acquainted with each other this analysis aims to study the degree to which acquaintance with the contributor may affect the objectivity of the tagger. Figures 8 and 9 illustrate the behaviour of social taggers and the contributors in the two cases mentioned above. By comparing Figures 8 and 9 to Figure 7 one can clearly see that there is very short deviation between them. In both cases the results again indicate that contributors and users seem to share the same opinion on potential usage scenarios. The behaviour of the social taggers in these three cases clearly demonstrates that evaluation through educational objective is an unbiased and objective way of evaluating the content of the repository.
0
1
2
3
4
Cognitive Domain(Process)
Affective Domain psycomotor Domain
Val
ue
Educational Objective
Overall Comparison of the Educational Objectives ad ded by the contributors and the Social taggers
Contributor
Social Taggers
Figure 8. Overall comparison of the educational obj ectives added by the contributors and the social taggers during the 2011 summer school
Figure 9. Overall comparison of the educational obj ectives added by the contributors and the social taggers on the 10 educational pathways that were contributed during the 2011 autumn school
The overall evaluation on all three domains indicate the high quality of the pathways contributed and
verify the concept that field trips in science museums may help students achieve high performance not only in the cognitive domains but also in the affective and psychomotor domains. Educational objectives
attributed on the content may not only help in its better description but also in its substantial evaluation. The results of evaluation of the content of the repository based on educational objectives indicated that this methodology can contribute in developing a deeper understanding on the value of educational content and its usability. Compared to current evaluation methods like star-system rating the evaluation through educational objectives provides a more robust and detailed overview of the content that allows identification of its added value not only on an overall manner but also on different domains besides the
0
1
2
3
4
Cognitive Domain(Process)
Affective Domain psycomotor Domain
Val
ue
Educational Objective
Comparison of the Educational Objectives added by the contributor and the Social taggers for
All the Pathways of the Summer School
Contributors
Social Taggers
0
1
2
3
4
Cognitive Domain(Process)
Affective Domain psycomotor Domain
Val
ue
Educational Objective
Comparison of the Educational Objectives added by the contributor and the Social taggers for
All the Pathways of the Autumn School 2011
Contributors
Social Taggers
cognitive one. Through our methodology, the evaluation of the content is expanded on the affective and
psychomotor domains that are both a substantial extension especially in the case of content that is related to science museums/centers.
Enhancing visits to the Science centers or museums with educational pathways
OSR approach was especially designed to create additional value to the visitors in science centres and museums. This has been illustrated during OSR validation and experimentation (presented further in the next chapter). During the OSR research workshops for teachers taking their classes to visits, the following teacher types were recognized:
The teacher´s attitudes are very important and pre-visit preparation is important not only for pupils but also for teachers to get motivated towards the subject. Based on this finding, we present recommendations for teachers taking their class to visit science centre or museum, keeping in mind the
OSR approach: Recommendations for teachers taking their class to visit science centre or museum
• Visit the science museum beforehand/find and study LOs and Pathways at the OSR Portal and take the related in-service.
• Share the purpose of the visit with the children before the visit.
• Make it clear to their children that the visit is a learning experience, not only a recreational day
out. • Explain the structure of the day and the environment/visit the website of the science
centre/museum before the visit to the children before the visit to reduce anxieties about being lost or not knowing what to do.
• Enable children to practise skills that are necessary to optimise their involvement in any practical work or to engage in a simulation at the science centre/study the exhibits virtually beforehand
via the OSR Portal • Provide tasks to be carried out at the science centre that are manageable in number for both
children and helpers/study the different phases of the selected pathway at the OSR Portal • Have a limited number of open-ended tasks at the science centre that require observation,
discussion, and deduction rather than a lot of written recording of factual information. • Advise helpers that they should give practical help with hands-on activities, act as play partners
for children, read labels for the children, and discuss exhibits • Do follow-up work in the classroom/find additional information and after-the-visit tasks at the
OSR Portal • Send parents information/share the OSR Portal pathway link with parents about the day to help
them talk about the visit with their children and support parents willing to encourage their child’s interest
• Review and recall the visit and ideas experienced in the science museum later in the academic year when studying related new science topics/find more resources at the OSR Portal, visit other science centres/museums in Europe in order to find out similar exhibits or exhibitions.
Future scenario: Educational mashups or playlists
Advanced ways of combining and packaging educational resources have risen for the future. In OSR
research worksops, users were underlining that resources need to be put together in attractive, innovative ways – beyond OSR’s open and structured pathways, there are examples such as combining educational
resources in similar ways to music or videos – e.g. playlists or educational mashups (see Figure 10).
Figure 10: Mentormob – example for an educational playlist provider. The following figure 11 summarizes the OSR roadmapping for Educational resources organization:
Figure 11: Open educational resources organization – OSR Roadmapping activity.
Community building
In OSR approach, various community engagement measures were put into place from dissemination to specific workshops and summer schools for various stakeholders these aspects have been described in the next chapter of this document. In addition, our approach was enhanced by the tools in OSR portal: social tagging, sharing in facebook/twitter. OSR relied heavily on existing networks of museums and science centres and research (Ecsite, Menon) and connections to informal visitors via the science centre and museum partners within the consortium. Social tagging
The OSR project took a decisive step ahead in the experimentation of the social tagging approach. Except
allowing users to contribute their own keywords as tags, OSR offers the opportunity to end-users to provide their own perceptions of certain standardized metadata elements of the ‘Application Profile’, too,
which are considered crucial to user experience and decisions. These elements are identified as the metadata on ‘Educational Objectives’ and ‘Context’. The project team has studied and analyzed users’ assessment of the educational objectives and the appropriate usage of a learning object compared to the
perceptions of the professionals who have formally annotated the resources. The aim of this study, was to bring standardized metadata techniques even closer to folksonomic approaches, providing unprecedented
versatility and insight into the effectiveness of professionals’ metadata tagging and end-users’ perceptions of the use of digital resources. Despite the danger of inappropriate user-generated metadata being
attached to OSR resources, the project deliberately took the risk to foster openness and user expression without imposing restrictions (e.g. a quality control and authorisation step before publicising of a free keyword tag), considering this an essential element of the open educational resources approach of the project so as to investigate the extent to which the community of OSR users are able to be self-regulated in that respect (e.g. by getting users themselves to ‘flag’ misconduct), or whether a stricter relevant provision should be included in the quality assurance procedures. Evaluation of OSR social tagging approach
*Editor’s note: This part of the roadmap is based on figures from 2011, the last year of OSR social tagging is still being analyzed by NTNU and will be added to the final Roadmap deliverable at the end of April 2012
For the roadmap of OSR, we decided to evaluate the search effectiveness of social tags on the OSR Portal in comparison to the NTSEC (National Taiwan Science Education Center, http://www.ntsec.gov.tw/en/). The NTSEC is the largest science education center in Taiwan. In this study social tags are analyzed based on
the following three issues: first, we examine whether social tags present different information compared with the metadata or the context of the annotated resources. If it is positive, social tags can then provide
Educational resources
organization
another approach for users to retrieve the resources. Second, we investigate whether social tags are often
denoted as keywords by users to query resources. This examines whether the vocabulary of users in tagging and querying is consistent. Third, we evaluate the users’ perception on social tagging. Users are asked to show their opinions about social tagging in a questionnaire. In general, the analyzed results show that social tags do in fact aid users in searching for resources from the repositories.
The repositories
The OSR repository consists of scientific learning objects and educational pathways. Both objects and pathways are made of a set of multimedia files including pictures, documents, hyperlinks, animations, and so on. Both objects and relevant pathways can be represented in 8 different main Europe languages. There are 762 learning objects and 151 educational pathways retrieved in OSR repository, respectively. For each learning object or pathway, a short summary (including title, classification, short description, education objectives), the metadata, and the tags (users must log first then can see the tags) of the object or pathway are presented in the entry page of the object or pathway. This page is for users to have a brief overview of
the object or pathway. A logged user can tag any learning object or pathway with two types of tags. The first type is the free tags which are terms made of arbitrary words given by the user. The second type is
the educational-context related tags which are a fixed set of terms. The user can select some of terms from the set to tag the learning object or pathway. A user query can be free text search or classification search. For a classification search, the user has to specify the category of the intended objects or pathways in science domain with the language and age range constraints. For a free text search query, users can specify arbitrary keywords to search learning objects or pathways. The objects or pathways of which tags, metadata, or summary contain the keywords will be regarded as the answers of the query.
The NTSEC exhibits 5065 electronic documents of science fair objects in which 4241 science fair objects were collected from national elementary, junior high, senior high, and vocational school science fairs (1986-2009) while 824 objects were collected from international science fairs (2002-2009). The context of a science fair document includes the authors, institution, abstract, keywords, and the content description of the science fair project. Similar to the OSR repository, once a user logs in as a member, he/she can tag any science fair document(s). Tags in the NTSEC are all the free type tags. A user can search objects by matching query keywords to the tags of science fair documents. We call this kind of retrieving manner the tag query. She can also retrieve objects by performing a full-text query. A full-text query performs similar to the free text search query does in the OSR repository.
The data sets
The OSR tags and user queries were gathered on 2011/03/28 and 2011/03/24, respectively. Since the classification queries specified by users were not kept and educational-context related tags are restricted to specify, in this report we only focus on the free text search queries and free tags. There are a total of 6014 tags tagged. Among those tags, 5529 tags are free tags (15.2% of total tags.) with 2556 unique free tags. In total, there were 931 learning objects and pathways tagged (100% of the exhibits. Some exhibits were not in the list of objects and educational paths I got, but have tags). For ease of presentation, a learning object or educational pathway in the OSR repository or a science fair document in the NTSEC repository is referred to as: the “object”. In the OSR repository, an object has an average of 2.74 unique free tags. Moreover, a user tags an object, on average, with 1.08 free tags.
For the NTSEC repository, tags and queries were collected before 2010/10/31. There were 18,814 tags
and 6,530 unique tags. Among the 5065 science fair objects, there were 2694 objects annotated (53.2% of the exhibits.) An object has an average of 2.42 unique tags. A user tags an object with 2.96 tags on average.
The usage frequency of tags in both the repositories presents a power law distribution. We respectively
show the distribution of tags in OSR and the NTSEC in Fig. 12. In each figure, y-axis presents the times of a particular tag used to tag objects and x-axis presents the sort of tags by decreasing their tagging frequency. A tag with smaller sorting number corresponds to higher tagging frequency. As we can see, only a few tags were frequently annotated in both repositories. Table 5 shows the top-10 frequently tagging tags in the OSR and the NTSEC repositories, respectively. As shown in Table 5, most of the tags of both OSR and NTSEC are scientific terms which would describe the content or subject of the associated objects.
Fig. 12.1 Tagging frequency of tags in the OSR repository
Fig. 12.1 Tagging frequency of tags in the NTSEC repository
Fig.12 Tag distribution
Table 5 Top-10 frequent tagging tags
Table 5.1 Top-10 frequent tagging tags in the OSR repository
Table 5.2 Top-10 frequent tagging tags in the NTSEC repository
The analyzed results
Observation 1: For the OSR repository, about 76.5% free tags of an object that do not appear in the
summary and metadata while for the NTSEC repository, there are about 14% of the tags of an object that do not appear in the context of the object. These tags provide additional information for the object and cannot be retrieved by classification search in the OSR repository or by using a full-text query in the NTSEC repository.
We call those tags which appear in the summary and metadata of objects in the OSR repository or those appear in the context of objects in the NTSEC repository the out-object tags. The other tags in the OSR repository or the NTSEC repository are thus called in-object tags . For the NTSEC’s tags, we further analyzed the distribution of the out-object tags in sets of tags of other objects, formal science terms indexed by the text books for junior high and senior high schools, and the yahoo news during
2010/1/1~2010/10/31. As shown in Fig. 13, only about 10% tags appear in the set of formal science terms. Moreover, about 1/3 of out-object tags appear in yahoo news. For a short summary to the result of
Fig. 13, only 10% of out-object tags are formal science terms and about 1/3 of these tags are used in daily life (i.e. they appear in yahoo news). This shows that some people annotate objects by using informal science terms or general terms which may be different from the keywords and metadata of the objects. For example, the tag “正負二度C” (plus/minus 2 degree Centigrade) often appears in yahoo news and
does not appear in the context of any objects. However, it is the top-6 tag that is most frequently used by people to annotate objects (Table 5.2.)
Fig. 14 Frequency of in-object tags of the NTSEC repository in different data sets
Observation 2: Almost all of in-object tags in both repositories are related to the content of the object. Therefore, social tags can be applied to describe the content of any educational media, such as document, documentary film, flash drama, and teaching material represented in figure.
Fig. 15 shows the total counts of in-object tags appearing in the fields of summary and metadata of the objects in the OSR repository. Fields short description, original title, and classification are the three fields with the highest counts (these fields are a part of the summary.) The field short description shortly describes the subject of the object; the field original title is the title of the object, and the field classification distinguishes the category of the object in science domain. These three fields are all related to content of
the objects. Regarding the in-object tags in the NTSEC repository, we found that only 0.4% of the in-object tags appear in the fields of authors, advisors, and institution, which are not related to the content of the object. Almost of the in-content tags are in the remaining fields which are related to the content of the object.
Fig. 15 Frequency of in-object tags of the OSR repository in the fields of the associated objects
Observation 3: In the NTSEC repository, at least 40% of queries are tag queries. This reveals that there are a certain number of users likely to search science fair objects by matching tags.
One way to realize whether social tags can help users to search in the repository is to examine the user
querying behavior. Intuitively, if most of users are willing to search objects by tag query manner, it would express the fact that social tags are beneficial to users in retrieving their intended sources. In the
repository, the full-text query is the most popular query manner for users to search science fair objects before introducing social tags. Therefore, we were interested in how users perform both full-text and tag queries interactively. Fig. 16 shows the frequency of both query types performed. In the figure, each point
of a curve stands for the frequency of a query type performed in a month. Note that, since social tags were
introduced after January, 2010, we don’t have the corresponding statistic from before February, 2010. As
shown in the figure, in the first four months (2010/2~2010/5), the frequency of tag queries is lower than that of full-text queries. In June, 2010, the frequency of tag queries reaches a peak, which is significant
than that of full-text queries. The reason why the tag query frequency dramatically increases in 2010/6 may due to an activity promoting social tagging. The activity began on 2010/5/15 and ended on 2010/6/15. After June, the frequency of tag queries reduces. In the last two months, the frequency even is less than that of full-text queries. In Taiwan, science fair projects are usually assigned to specific grade of students in schools. That is, every year there is always a number of new students who demand the resources of the science fair repository for their science fair projects. These new students initially would not be familiar with older social tags. On the other hand, a number of old users (the senior students) who
have been familiar to social tags would gradually reduce their use of the repository. The above situation would also be a reason why the frequency of tag queries reduces after 2010/6. Another possible reason why the tag query frequency is less than that of full-text query may due to the fact that only about 50% of total objects were tagged. This would discourage users to employ tag query to search objects. Therefore, we believe that once all the objects are well tagged, the frequency of tag query would increase accordingly.
Fig. 17 further shows the percentage of each query type performed in the ration of total queries
performed. As we can see, despite the reduction in frequency of tag queries in the last few months, it approximately occupies 40% of the total queries. This indicates that there are a certain number of users who are used to using tags to search for objects.
Fig. 16 Frequencies of both query types Fig. 17 Percentages of both query types
Observation 4: In the OSR repository, about 31.7% of queries match tags while in the NTSEC repository, over 70% of queries match tags.
An alternative way to evaluate the retrieval ability of social tags is to examine whether tags are often
matched by queries. For the OSR repository, in Fig. 18, we show the total counts of tags matched by queries (Note that, the same tag may appear in n different objects, its count is thus aggregated by adding n
once when a query matches the tag.) In Fig. 19, we show the top-10 keywords that users most frequently query. As shown in Fig. 19, most of the queries are related to the classification or content of the objects.
This is significant different from the tags in Table 1.1 (Top-10 frequent tagging tags in the OSR repository) in that, while annotators are likely give the tags related to metadata of the objects, searchers are likely search the terms related to the content of the objects.
Fig 18. The counts of tags matched by queries in the OSR repository
Fig 19. The top-10 keywords that users most frequently query in the OSR repository
Regarding the NTSEC repository, we define the hit rate for a set of queries as the ratio of the queries in a set that match at least one social tag. Fig. 20 shows the hit rates of both query types. A bar in the figure represents the hit rate of a query type in a month. As shown in the figure, the hit rate of tag queries per month is very high. A probably explanation is that the users who employ tag queries seem to know how to specify query to find objects. That is, the users mainly focus on the content of science fair objects when
adopting their tag query manner. In average, about 70% of queries match social tags. This shows that in addition to searching the context of science fair objects, social tags significantly provide another way for
users to find resources. This states the user vocabulary in the NTSEC repository is similar in the specifications of both query and tag.
Fig. 20 The hit rates of both query types in the NTSEC repository
Observation 5: For the NTSEC repository, the questionnaire shows that about 85% of users agree that social tags help them to search for objects.
To further realize users’ perception on social tagging, we surveyed 86 participants (47 female, 36 male
and 3 unspecified). Each participant had an account on the NTSEC online system and used the science fair repository. The job distribution of the 86 participants were: teachers (27 persons), students (23 persons),
information techniques (3 persons), finance related (3 persons), manufacture related (5 persons), Communication related (1 person), transportation related (1 person), others (16 persons), unemployed (4
persons), unspecified (3 persons). Accordingly the composition of participants, the community of the repository consisted of teachers and students. The questionnaire was constituted of 22 items which questioned users’ perceptions on social tagging, social tagging related functionalities, user interface, and
other functionalities of the repository. All participants had to respond the questions mostly by expressing their agreement or disagreement on a 5 point Likert scale (5 is complete agreement and 1 is complete disagreement.) The Cronbach alpha for this questionnaire was 0.845, which means high reliability.
Findings:
In Table 6, we show a portion of the questions and the corresponding results. These questions are directly related to social tagging. Generally, about 85% of users agree to social tags can help them to search objects (question 5.) Based on the results of questions 1 and 2, most users agreed that tags can help
them manage objects. In a social tagging system, users can bookmark objects by their own vocabulary. Therefore, for the users themselves, it is easier to recover and classify objects. In addition to the fact that
most of the tag queries can find answers (shown by Fig. 20), the high score for question 3 also implies that
the returned answers are often the objects that users needed. On the other hand, in a social tagging
environment, some implicit concepts would be easier discovered by collaboratively annotation. Such concepts would appeal to users. Question 4 reveals above viewpoint that about 75% of users would be interested in the objects that were not expected to appear in the answer set.
Table 6. A part of survey results Num. Question Avg. score
1 Tags can help me to faster recover the retrieved objects 4.29
2 Tags can help me to classify objects 4.29
3 Tags can help me find the intended objects 4.18
4 Tags allow me to find interesting objects accidentally 3.77 5 In a total, social tags help me to search for objects 4.22
Table 3 shows a comparison between the social tags of the OSR and the NTSEC repository. Based on this table, we conclude 3 remarks for these two sets of social tags.
1. The percentage of unique tags to the total number of tags in the OSR repository is higher than the percentage in the NTSEC repository (row 1 of Table 3). This would be the fact that tagging in the OSR repository is just in the initial stages. We expect that as more and more tags inserted, the ratio of unique tags to total tags will decrease.
2. The tag distribution in both repositories follows the power (long-tail) law. Both different sets of social tags are likely related to the subject or content of objects.
3. Regarding row 3 of Table 3, In the OSR repository, there are 76% tags of an object do not appear in the summary and metadata, while in the NTSEC repository only 14% tags of an object do not appear in the context. The OSR tags provide more additional information for objects than the NTSEC tags do. However, as shown by row 5 of Table 3, the vocabulary of the NTSEC tags is very similar to that of the NTSEC queries. This assures that the NTSEC tags are more searchable for users, in both full-text queries and tag queries.
Table 6. Comparison of the social tags of the OSR and the NTSEC repositories
Future work would include a user survey for the OSR repository. The survey results of both repositories
can then be compared (The topics of survey will include the motivation of why users tag, the impact of using social tagging, and so on). The tags and queries in both repositories will be continuously collected and then all the experiments will be reevaluated based on a larger scale of user logs.
Future Scenarios: Social networks and connectivity
In OSR research workshops, the scenario of bringing together repositories and social networks was heavily introduced by the users demands. Ochoa and Duval (2009) formulate: “It would be an interesting experiment to measure the impact that the introduction of social networks could have in the sharing of material. For example, users would be interested in knowing when a colleague in his same field has published new learning objects (Duval, 2005). This social networks can be created explicitly (a la´ Facebook) or implicitly (relationship mining) (Matsuo et al., 2006).”
Figure 21: Sharing OER in social networks.
OSR approach towards sharing of OER in social was introduced at the last year of the project for facebook
and twitter and we have indications that these functionalities were taken well by the users. However, the influence of social networks for OER sharing should be studied further in future projects.
In the future scenario that OSR envisions, repositories will adapt towards social networks by sharing resources and pathways in the existing networks as well as generating social networks around repositories. This approach will be further tested in Open Discovery Space project 2012-2015 (ODS, 2012). To summarize OSR Roadmapping approach for community building:
Figure 22: OSR Roadmapping approach: Community building.
PDA and mobile support
Science centre and museum visitors are one of several user groups targeted in the OSR project. A
characteristic of a person in this user group is that he or she visits various science exhibitions in situ. The spatial connection between a visitor and a science exhibit can potentially be exploited to further enhance the user experience, for example by facilitating mobile access to digital content relevant to the specific exhibit being visited. For this purpose, a mobile version of the OSR portal (henceforth ‘OSR mobile’) designed for use on mobile and PDA devices has been developed and implemented. In our analysis, people visiting museum galleries without PDAs spent a considerably less time in the gallery (see Figure 23).
Community Building
Figure 23: Time spent in museum gallery when using PDAs in comparison to users who didn’t.
The method used in OSR mobile to establish a spatial connection between visitors equipped with an Internet-enabled mobile device and a particular exhibit is to scan a visual marker associated with the
exhibit. Visual markers are used to encode information, such as URLs (Uniform Resource Locator), that camera enabled mobile devices can decode with freely available software. Provided that the information
contained in the visual marker is a URL, the web browser in the mobile device can be directed to that particular URL. In an OSR enabled science exhibition, a visual marker scan would direct the visitor’s mobile web browser to a related digital resource stored in the OSR portal.
Context-aware features for PDAs and mobile smart phones
During OSR research workshops, focus on PDA development was envisioned further for the future. The following functionalities are seen in the future of PDA and mobile smart phones access for technology enhanced learning.
Indoor positioning
Indoor positioning will enable better tracking of the user within museum galleries. Local positioning system allows tracking and identifying the location of objects in real time, which will allow real virtual
visits to museums and science centres. Using simple, inexpensive badges or tags attached to the objects, readers receive wireless signals from these tags to determine their locations (ISO, 2006). RTLS typically refers to systems that provide passive or active (automatic) collection of location information. Location information usually does not include speed, direction, or spatial orientation. These additional measurements would be part of a navigation, manoeuvring or positioning system. We envision that museum collections will be online catalogues into an indoor positioning triggered map where users can get information to their mobile and PDA devices just by walking around the halls.
Radio-frequency identification
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the use of a wireless non-contact system that uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data from a tag attached to an object, for the purposes of
automatic identification and tracking. OSR research workshop envisions RFID also to be used for open science resources in science centres and museums in the future.
Media to smart phone or tablet through sound
Figure 24: Sonic notify advert.
Smartphones and PDAs in the future scenarios will also utilize voice and sound recognition. This is also
seen as a future direction for museums and science centers regarding science collections. Illustrating OSR roadmap summary for PDA/smartphones:
Figure 25: OSR Roadmapping approach: PDA and Smartphones.
Quality assurance
OSR quality assurance of educational resources, pathways and social tags is further described in the three
annual deliverables of D-1.6. Quality assurance report (year1, year2 and year3). Our approach to quality contained two main schemes:
1. Monitored quality against technical quality criteria
2. User-oriented quality instruments.
PDA and Smart phone access PDA and Smart phone access
User-oriented quality instruments can provide a sustainable solution for quality, which does not demands a working community but no base funding in order to work (compare the idea behind Wikipedia). However, it was recognised that user-oriented quality alone cannot secure the quality of the ERs and EPs, which is why a systematic technical review of resources and pathways was executed by a quality team against quality criteria.
User-oriented quality instruments in OSR portal:
• User assessment – Users can rate content with stars from 0-5.
• Social tagging – Users can give social tags to content • Quality mark of OSR – Trusted content and content that have undergone the OSR technical review
certification are marked with this symbol. • Commenting – Users could leave their comments on content
• Disclaimer – Users could report content that is poor in quality • Sharing – Users can share the content via social networks such as facebook or twitter.
Technical review certification
Content from within the consortium (uploaded by consortium partners) will be automatically certified by the OSR quality logo (see figure 26). All other content was reviewed by OSR Quality team which consisted partners from all the science centers and museums within consortium.
Figure 26 . OSR project’s quality symbol OSR content was reviewed by OSR quality team consisting partners from the OSR consortium. With the following certification guidelines: Table 7: Certification criteria for OSR Technical quality review
Certification criteria
Certification guidelines Open educational resources (OER) Educational pathways (EP)
Metadata The Metadata attached to the resource is complete and it describes the resource
appropriately
The Metadata attached to the EP is complete and it describes the resource
appropriately Relevance OER content needs to be relevant with the
topic of the OER.
Educational pathways content should be
relevant to the corresponding OSR and its domain. EPs need to be have all the phases filled in.
Links All links in OER are functioning and relevant.
All links in EPs are functioning and relevant.
Semantics The titles and descriptions of OER should be meaningful.
The titles and descriptions of educational pathways should be meaningful.
Spam filtering OER should not contain any obvious spam EPs should not contain any obvious
words or inappropriate material. spam words or inappropriate material.
Future scenario: Quality of social tags
OSR Research reviewed different approaches for quality assurance of social tags. This work has been
described in D-1.6. Annual Quality Report (Year 3). From the approaches, OSR selected the most important quality attributes of social tags and propose them as a number of certification criteria for repositories (Table 8). By defining those certification criteria we distinguished between domain-specific and general tags.
Domain-specific tags describe ad-hoc terms and entities from the domain of the corresponding OSRs, e.g. circular motion, angular velocity, inertia.
General tags represent general terms and entities, e.g. understand, pay attention , picture. Table 8. Certification criteria for social tags
Certification criteria Certification guidelines
Domain-specific tags General tags
Language Tags may be provided in any language. The language of tags can be different from the language of the corresponding OSR.
Tags may be provided in any language. The language of tags can be different from the language of the corresponding OSR.
Relevance Tags should be relevant to the corresponding OSR and its domain.
Tags should be relevant to the corresponding OSR and its domain.
Semantics Tags should be meaningful. Tags should be meaningful.
Examples of meaningless tags are tag1, tag2, blahblahblah, any kind of
abracadabra (e.g. ffjdhfkdjhf). “All-purpose” tags should be
eliminated, if possible. E.g. the tag “to understand” can be assigned virtually to each and every OSR.
Correctness Tags should be written/spelled correctly.
Tags should be written/spelled correctly.
Normalization Tags should be normalized. For example, the tags angular velocity and angular_velocity should appear in the same form.
Tags should be normalized. For example, the tags “web 2.0” and “web_2.0” should appear in the same form.
Dealing with synonyms Synonyms and tags with different
spelling variations (e.g. British vs. American) should be preserved to enhance search efficiency.
Synonyms and tags with different
spelling variations (e.g. British vs. American) should be preserved to enhance recall.
Spam filtering Tags should not contain any obvious spam words (e.g. rude words, replica watches, viagra, etc.)
Tags should not contain any obvious spam words, e.g. rude words, advertisements (viagra, replica watches, etc.). Tags should not contain links to external spam resources.
Monitoring of user activity
The number of new tags provided for a specific OSR should be within
reasonable limits.
The number of new tags provided for a specific OSR should be within
reasonable limits.
Within the duration of OSR project, very little problems arose with spamming of tags. Reviewing the tight schedule and prioritizing of the limit of OSR project’s budget, quality assurance of social tags was not implemented within the portal. However, we see this as a bigger problem if social tagging tools would be open for users that are not registered as well. Future scenario: Recommender systems
In OSR workshops, also further steps towards automatic quality was envisioned and user-generated quality is going heavily towards different recommender systems, usually based on contextualized attention metadata (CAM). CAM describes how people interact with information (what they read, watch,
listen to, publish, etc.) in different contexts. CAM streams are collected from server-side sources like
digital repositories and then used for purpose of recommending other objects/pathways to users based
on the information collected on their surfing habits. The idea is to generate a service that the users can trust to provide them quality resources suitable for their purposes.
To summarize the OSR Roadmapping for quality assurance of OER:
In this chapter we describe the full field experimentation of OSR. Our approach was tested out with full
validation with users (WP6) and enhanced with future scenarios, described by experts (WP7). Validation work carried out has been described in deliverable D-6.4. Validation Report and research workshops carried out have been described in deliverable D-8.7 Research workshops (Proceedings). In order to fully understand the OSR approach, we give out three further cases of experimentation in this document. These cases have been highlighted from the experimentation that we have taken as they well describe the implementation in real life context.
Validation workshops
Two cycles of OSR validation workshops targeted stakeholders from both formal and informal education – teachers, students, museum educators, general visitors of museums, parents etc. 14 validation workshops
and 2 summer schools were arranged in the cycle and 21 validation workshops and 2 summer schools on the second cycle. 9 additional museums were consulted. Our validation approach also included a large
scale online questionnaire. All activities are reported in detail in D-6.4. Due to our large scale testing with real life users, we are able to recommend the approach that we have taken in OSR for future of digital
science education.
Research workshops
During OSR project, total of 16 research activities were conducted. On the second year of the project, 7 Envisioning workshops and other research activities, and on the third year, 9 Future Scenarios workshops. These workshops were completed in the WP7 framework with the guideline of envisioning and planning the future for the topics concerning the OSR design. Research activities took place in Greece, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Taiwan, China and USA. These activities are described in detail in D-8.7.
Quality assurance
To highlight our approach, we have chosen two examples to this deliverable, to illustrate, how our approach works.
Highlight experimentation Case 1:
Implementation of a school field tr ip with the use of mobile devices
The case of “Foucault’s pendulum” pathway and students activities in the school of Ellinogermaniki Agogi.
Within the framework of interdisciplinary activities of the Greek primary school curriculum, students of the 5th grade of Ellinogermaniki Agogi had the opportunity to learn about Earth’s rotation around its axis
in combination with a visit to Foucault’s pendulum. The purpose of this activity was to teach students about the different motions of Earth and the concept of apparent movement but more importantly to give them an effective example of innovative thinking and how creativity can result to great achievements. Eight classes, 227 students in total, visited Foucault’s pendulum located in Ellinogermaniki Agogi premises. The activity comprised of 3 different sessions and it was performed by all eight classes exactly as described in the educational pathway in the OSR repository. The first session was a preparatory lesson that preceded the visit to the exhibit. The second session was the main course which took place in front of the exhibit while the third and last part mainly focused on assessing the impact of the exercise in terms of knowledge as well as provoking students’ attention. Prior to their visit, students had a preparatory course where they discussed about Earth’s movement in
general and how we here on Earth perceive it. Students were asked how they can tell that the Earth is moving based on their everyday experience. In all classes most students’ answer was the succession of night and day. However, about 10% of the students in each class gave different answers, such as earthquakes or clouds that travel. Thus, the first part of the activity focused mainly on discussing with students which are the different motions of Earth, why clouds move and what is the difference between earthquakes and the regular motions of Earth. Teachers in each classroom also informed the students about their visit to Foucault’s pendulum and that this pendulum is used in order to witness Earth’s
rotation around its axis. However, students were told nothing about how the demonstration works. In order to provoke their curiosity the teacher challenged students to come up with ideas about how we
could prove Earth’s rotation while standing on it. Students found it very hard to think of any ways to prove Earth’s rotation. This difficulty gave the teacher the opportunity to stress out how important Foucault’s
demonstration is since in his time nobody else could think of a way to prove Earth’s rotation although they were already certain of the phenomenon.
The second part of the activity (Figure 28) was a 45 minutes visit to Foucault’s pendulum. When students arrived at the exhibit they where given 5 minutes to observe the pendulum and discuss about the pendulum in general None of the students could tell how the pendulum proves Earth’s motion; however, most of them where under the impression that the pendulum is also used as a clock. This impression as students stated, was due to the fact that the pendulum is twisting and there are marks on the disk underneath it. After this introductory discussion students where divided into four groups and each group was given a PDA device (Figure 29). By using a QR code
students accessed the OSR repository and downloaded a flash
application designed to implement this activity. Students used the
application and with the guidance of the teacher they found out how
Foucault’s pendulum works. The whole activity was based on the inquiry-based
model. In all classes teachers did not give out any information about the
pendulum; their main role was to ask relative questions and
encourage students to look for the
answers by searching in the
application. Students managed to
Figure 28. A snapshot for the student’s visit to Foucault’s pendulum and how does it illustrate Earth’s twisting motion.
Figure 19. Fifth grade students using the PDA application during their visit to Foucault’s pendulum. Figure 30. Students observing the
motion of the small pendulum in order to understand the concept of apparent movement.
answer most of the tutor’s questions by retrieving information from the application. The main focus of the
activity was on the videos displayed on the application which explain effectively the concept of apparent motion as well as the images that explain the two kinds of motion a plain on Earth’s surface is subjected to. The main difficulty students faced was to understand the idea that in reality it is the floor that is twisting underneath the pendulum and not the pendulum itself. This difficulty was expected to come up since students are basically asked to question what they see with their own eyes. In order to overcome
this obstacle a smaller pendulum was also used (Figure 30). The explanation of the phenomenon required two steps. Students first set the small pendulum in motion themselves and verified the fact that when the
hanging point of a pendulum is twisted, the pendulum’s plain of oscillation doesn’t change. Thus they where convinced that the pendulum indeed, does not twist. Then, students used the PDA devices in order
to watch a video that illustrates the idea of apparent motion with the use of a pendulum. Students had some time to compare what they saw in the video with the movement of the miniature pendulum in front of them, discuss their opinions with their peers and finally come to fully comprehend the phenomenon. The combination of the video and the miniature pendulum proved to be a very effective combination for targeting the problem at hand. After completing the presentation of the phenomenon and all student questions where answered, there was a general conversation about the pendulum and its properties as well as Foucault’s life. The conversation was also implemented by the use of the application which
students used to find out more information about Foucault’s original demonstration as well as Foucault himself. It is worth noticing that in all classes students had no problems in using the PDA devices whatsoever. This second part of the activity was finished by having students describe all they had learned and by asking them to express their opinion about the whole concept of the demonstration. The teachers pointed out the simplicity of Foucault’s idea and how his innovative way of thinking led him to accomplish such a remarkable achievement. The third and last part of the activity took place in a computer room. The main objective of this last part of the activity is to assess the impact of the activity in terms of knowledge and interest. Students from all eight 5th grade classes divided into groups of two or three, accessed the OSR Repository and opened the application which they had used through the PDA devices in the previous session. This time by following
their teacher’s instructions they answered the quiz in the application. After completing the quiz, students had some time to express their opinion regarding the activity by adding social tags in the front page of the
application in the OSR repository. Students’ view of the activity can be estimated by the tags they added to the application as well as the
pathway. When adding tags and answering the quiz students where sitting in pairs or groups of three. Out of 227 students we obtained 69 fully answered quizzes and 93 tags. At the beginning of the activity, students in all eight classes were asked whether they had heard of
Foucault’s pendulum and none of them had any idea what it is about. This fact in combination with their scores in the quiz which they answered in the third part of the activity indicates that the impact of the
activity in the students’ cognitive knowledge is exceptionally high. As indicated in table 1 below, about 70% of the students answered all questions correctly and about 16% of them had 9 out of 10 questions answered correctly.
Table 9
Students’ achievement in the quiz answered after the visit to Foucault’s pendulum and the use of the PDA application.
Number of correct answers Number of quizzes
10/10 48
9/10 11
8/10 3
7/10 2
6/10 3
5/10 0
4/10 1
3/10 1
2/10 0
1/10 0
0/10 0
Total 69
After answering the quiz, students where asked to tag the educational pathway or the respective application in the “OSR” repository. These tags were free text tags so students could describe in a nutshell what they thought of the activity. The tags given by the students were categorized and they are presented in the table 2 below:
Table 10
Categorization of students’ free tags regarding their opinion about the activity using.
very positive correspondence 40
positive correspondence 26
neutral correspondence 9
negative correspondence 5
very negative correspondence 2
Total tags 82
* All tags were added after students finished reading about the pendulum through the flash application. Overall, live observation of an exhibit in combination with the presentation of respective explanatory videos and animations through the PDA device appears to have excited students. Students in all classes had the impulse to compare what they saw in the videos to the real exhibits. These comparisons triggered most of the discussions among fellow students in order to exchange their opinions. As indicated in table 2, more than 80% of the students had a positive reaction towards the activity. Apparently, only 7 out of the 82 tags correspond to students that appear not to have enjoyed the activity.
Highlight experimentation Case2:
Application of the Light Ray and Colour pathway wit h students activities in the rural school of Glafki
The students of the 3rd grade of Glafki’s gymnasium in Greece visited virtually the Interactive Science and
Technology Exhibition hall of Eugenides Foundation. Through the realization of this pathway, students where given the opportunity to:
• Connect science with every day phenomena, technological applications as well as art. • Engage in educational activities that involve numerous representations and simulations and through
them attempt to overcome their language difficulties. • Practice in using multimedia as well as the web, as internet connection in that area is a relatively new
introduction. The first didactical hour was devoted to the discussion among students about their ideas regarding the
origin of colors and some basic properties of light like diffraction and reflection. The teacher presented numerous images regarding the issues under discussion and took special attention in writing on the board all of the student’s unknown words and explaining thoroughly each one of them.
The second didactical hour of the “pre-visit” phase was conducted in the computer lab with the assistance of the teacher of informatics. Students used simulations
that illustrated the refraction and reflection of light as well as the behavior of different color light rays.
The “visit” phase included the virtual visit of students to the Interactive Science and Technology Exhibition hall of Eugenides Foundation through a Skype connection. The virtual visit lasted 35 minutes and included the presentation of two sets of
exhibits namely,
“The invisible glass” and “Play with light”. Students where asked to gather as many information as possible through observation, attempt to explain the phenomenon based on evidence and consider other explanations of the phenomenon, others than theirs.
The purpose of the virtual visit was to: • Gather observational data
• Interpret the phenomena observed • Propose alternate explanations and engage the
students to a live dialog The Objectives of the virtual visit were:
• Familiarization with the nature of light through the “Play with Light” exhibits
• Experience of the interaction of light with matter with the assistance of the “Invisible Glass”
exhibit , refraction – consequences of the refraction index between two materials
• Provision of alternative explanations and initiation of a discussion among the students. The activities that took place were:
• Familiarization with the nature of light using the “play with light” exhibit
Figure 31. Pre-visit phase
Figure 32. Play with Light Exhibition
Figure 33. Explanation of interaction of light with matter
• Familiarization with the interactivity of light with
matter using the “invisible light” exhibit where the students had the opportunity to learn about the
properties of refraction and the role of different refraction indexes between the two
materials.
• Initiation of a dialogue among student teams, submission of diverge views and involvement of the teacher using digital material providing an explanation for the phenomena observed.
• Drawing rays of light on a working paper sheet, realize the concept of a light source, what it means to “see” an object and what is the course of a
rays passing through one optical mean to another. A second PC was used in order to make available to students
the PowerPoint presentation of the scenario. The Skype conference and the whole interactive process, took place in
the school computer lab with the assistance of the school staff. The demonstration of the exhibits as well as the
explanation of the phenomena was done by a physicist of the Eugenides Foundation, responsible for the learning pathways. There was interactive
communication between him and the students, who were very impressed by it. Although in the beginning they were reluctant to participate, during the course of the presentation they got more involved and they were very enthusiastic to prepare their own optic experiments with digital material
and directions sent to them by the Eugenides Foundation. The teacher had a supporting role in the process providing explanations to the most difficult scientific
terms. The student activities then took place where a group of students designed the path that light follows through various objects and another group presented the findings on the whiteboard. This led to a discussion among students on the interpretations of the various phenomena. The Learning experience
was enhanced with the presentations of the experiments the curator of Eugenides Foundation suggested to the students.
The “Post Visit” phase took place in
Figure 34. Invisible Glass experiment
Figure 35. Virtual visit over Skype
Figure 36. Interaction with the Eugenides Foundation curator
Figure 37. Student Activities. Experiments suggested by the Eugenides Foundation
curator
another time during a science lecture with the use of a
PowerPoint presentation. The purpose of the lecture was the connection of physics with the art of painting through
the colors and techniques of post-impressionist painters such as George Sera who started the movement of puantilizm. Student Activities:
• The students viewed paintings from George Sera
• Were informed on how, the painter, affected by scientific observation on optics invented the technique of puantilizm where the mix of colours takes pace in the eye of the viewer on not on the palette.
• Completed an evaluation form where they were tested on subjects such as colour mixes on a particular painting, reflection and refraction and more.
• Justified their answers engaging in a dialogue with the other student groups and evaluated the answers with the assistance of their teacher.
• The students presented in groups the concepts behind the analysis, reflection and refraction of light.
The evaluation of the results from the questionnaires and tests answered by students demonstrated a slight improvement in the performance of students over traditional methods of teaching but they demonstrate a significant improvement in the performance of lagging and uninterested students. These students who otherwise seem uninterested and without significant academic results showed a remarkable interest and involvement once the teaching process changed from the traditional delivery of knowledge by
the teac
her to Inquiry Based Science Education learning model. This fact reinforces the hypothesis that students prefer to be active participants in the learning process rather than passive recipients and also for this area in particular, the academic results of these students are affected by the difficulty in using and understanding the Greek language. (Glafki is an area with a predominant minority population and immigrants) .
Figure 38. A painting by George Sera
Figure 39. Explanation of the behavior of light when falls on different material
Figure 40. Completing the Evaluation Form Figure 41. Presentation of findings
It is of importance also to notice, the spontaneous formation of students groups to study subjects of
common interest. The above demonstrates the social role of Inquiry Based learning over traditional methods and its effectiveness in improving the social characteristics of students operating within an open, interactive, resource rich learning environment. The students were encouraged to participate in the different learning processes and activities (conversations both live and over the web, presentations, virtual interactive activities). Answered
questions on the subjects taught and their results were far better than those achieved through traditional methods of teaching. Additionally they demonstrated improved skills in describing the scientific
phenomena that they observed. Moreover they developed skills in using interactive environments and several of them asked for the web addresses of Eugenides Foundation learning pathways to conduct the
experiments in their homes. The groups had difficulties in coordinating their activities but this process was facilitated by the presence and assistance of their teacher.
5. Sustainability
Moving towards a holistic and sustainable exploitation path: the returns of the stakeholders
Latest evidence from a number of European and national/local technology driven innovation projects, in the areas of both knowledge content management as well as changing pedagogical schemes, shows that the sustainability of the results, especially if the project aims at establishing an online service provider – either under a B2B or even more a B2C (business-to-citizen) model -, is much dependent on the capacity of the partnership to adopt an holistic approach to the versatility of these results in close relation to the potential of the business paradigm adopted and the commitment of (even some of) the partners to this. Beyond the literature review (Kastis, 2011), consultation within the OSR consortium provided clear insights into the trends, opportunities and challenges arising in the fields of science learning, in the still somehow fragmented formal and informal learning areas, as well as in the fields of cultural and scientific content made available through the internet cloud, with the necessary tools for deploying the emerging knowledge building paradigms. By encouraging and facilitating the exchange between at least three distinct “worlds”, those of formal school education, informal science learning represented by the
European science museums/centres, and the use of learning metadata and social tagging, the OSR Learning Strategies adopted have made a rather effective use of the rich and diverse expertise
represented in this project to reflect on the state-of-the-art and address the emerging challenges. The present document aims to serve for the necessary reflection by the partnership on the adopted
rationale, the background and the implementation of the project and thus to provide a useful input into the next project phases, to be useful to the European research and learning communities – and the
exploitation planning, through the evolution of both the development perspectives and the stakeholders’ learning strategies.
The development of a strategy in order to establish a balanced, federated approach to digital content items’ and content composites’ tagging and authoring, in community based and online sharing environments, builds on the sustainability of the participatory processes and the stakeholders’ returns anticipated, both tangible and intangible. In the case of the OSR portal, the sustainability of the continuous populating of the OSR repository would be the cornerstone of the exploitation venture. And for this sustainability to be reached we need The fast increase of the motivation of the learning communities to join and contribute; and The concertation of the learning strategies of the science museums and centres, in relation to the evolution of the OSR portal operational model.
The following perspectives were discussed and reflected upon, in the framework of the OSR partnership, as in the course of the road-mapping and the exploitation planning work, in order to reach a consensus for the successful running of the OSR portal after the end of the project, to the benefit of the participating actors, the other science museums and centres to be invited to join and, of course, the European science learning community:
I. The maintenance of the federated science content annotation scheme and the social tagging services, in relation to the expansion of the digital science repositories made accessible through the internet cloud by the science museums, research and science education centres, as well as other academic actors in Europe;
II. The evolution of the science knowledge building paradigm, affecting all learning activities and constituencies in the 21st century societies, through the blending of formal and informal learning experiences, especially as it regards the school curricula and their evolution towards competence defined objectives, implies certain operational schemes for the management of cultural and scientific content, to sustain inter-operabilities among digital repositories, in such a way to facilitate the targeted aggregation of content, though semantic-based tools, and the work of learning communities, brought about with the predominant practices of the social web. In such a context the OSR portal services profile caters for both the emerging science learning needs and the collaborative schemes for knowledge consolidation and community sharing, as well as for the needs of the established knowledge management organizations (science museums, centres and universities, the bricks and mortars of the science knowledge “sector”), which will try to diversify if not expand their portfolio of services and programs to their “clients” (visitors) in both the physical and the virtual space.
III. The sustainability of the science learning communities will be achieved through alliances of mutual benefit with the school networks emerging at both national/regional and European level – through the expanding federation with regional actors (the current and potential “stakeholders” of the OSR portal).
IV. And finally, serious effort was allocated for the concertation of the learning strategies of the OSR portal in line with those evolving or already consolidated of each one of the science museums and centres of the network (existing partnership). This compatibility work aimed at establishing complementarities and inter-operabilities between the services and the content management solutions, which will offer “one-stop-shop” experiences to the OSR portal visitors (users/learners)
across Europe, as well as access to a vast pool of science content and learning facilitating tools and proposals from across an expanding number of European expert organizations.
Further we plan the following sustainability approach:
Sustainability of the OSR Portal
OSR portal will be maintained by INTRASOFT/Elinogermaniki Agogi after the project ends in the spring of 2012. The portal server will be run in a similar manner as during the project; however, we don’t envision any technological enhancements to the portal after the end of the project. In the first years, INTRASOFT will host the portal, but Elinogermaniki Agogi will take over if needed in the future. OSR content will be
harvested by ARIADNE framework (The ARIADNE Foundation in charge of ARIADNE service, is a not-for-profit association that aims to foster Share and Reuse of Learning Resources. Facilitating the reuse of
digital resources that can be used to support learning) in order to assure that OSR resources and pathways will be used in the future. Our approach was built on standards (such as IEEE LOM, IMS LD, etc.)
to assure compatibility and sustainability of our approach. OSR approach of standardized OER discovery and use will also be utilized in the future developments in CEN Workshops for Learning Technologies.
Sustainability of the OSR services
The pathway and metadata authoring tools will still be available after the project ends, along with the social tagging tool. The quality review of the resources will still be done automatically for all the trusted organizations, such as the project partners. Otherwise than that the user-based quality review
mechanisms such as the rating and commenting tool will still be in place to provide insights for the future users of the portal.
Sustainability of the OSR user community and approach
Each OSR partner will keep on disseminating OSR portal among their normal activities around science learning. Museum and Science centre partners in the future will be:
• Continue raising visibility and awareness of OSR portal in their websites and newsletters
• Continue promoting OSR in Science Education related events which they have in their normal yearly agendas (e.g. annual conferences, workshops etc.)
• OSR approach will be promoted in further summer schools and projects
• OSR results will be promoted in future projects which partners will be participating in (e.g. Open Discovery Space)
6. Conclusions and recommendations
In this document, we described the final status of Science Resources (re-)usability approach collecting the OSR project’s results throughout the three years of the project. OSR Roadmap based on the OSR approach
to Open Educational Science Resources series of research workshops and meetings with external experts. To highlight, the main contributions of the project can be presented as follows:
a) The OSR standard-based educational metadata structure (‘OSR IEEE LOM Application Profile’); b) Flexible schemes for the combination of digital resources into wider meaningful learning experiences appropriate for the user and context of use (‘OSR Educational Pathways’);
c) Opportunities offered and studied for the exploitation of the potential of social tagging in the OSR project (‘OSR social tagging and folksonomies’).
Our approach has been validated and experimented in large scale implementation and our findings
support the overall approach. OSR approach:
• Gives additional value to museum and science centre visitors, whether they are informal or formal. This additional value is e.g. extra information about collections, further depth to classes visiting museums or access to items that you did not have time to look at while browsing the exhibition
• Can be visited both from outside and inside (via mobile devices) physical museum visits
• Achieves its educational objectives for science education
• Gets formal and informal learning communities further involved in science education by offering an interactive approach of social tagging, sharing and commenting
Due to our large scale testing with real life users, we are able to recommend the approach that we have taken in OSR for future of digital science education. Based on OSR roadmapping experience – we envision that repositories in the future will take the future step from pure content organization in metadata towards thematic, learning design supported, complex solutions. In the following table 11 we summarize the OSR Roadmap from our approach through future scenarios to the recommendations for future developers of educational resources organization and research:
Recommendations for developers and projects of future steps in open educational resources organization
and stand-alone resources into extended meaningful activities (Educational Pathways) Organization of content based on IEEE
Standard. Extension of the vocabulary for classification to include the science
curriculum
Advanced repositories that offer high quality
educational scenarios rich in eLearning resources; Organization that meets the needs of the teaching community better.
One step beyond:
Standardized organization of ER around advanced learning design supported repositories,
Better organization of educational resources
based on teachers searching habits and science curricula.
Pedagogical design Educational Pathways (IBSE-model) that connect formal and informal learning.
Characterization of the content using educational objectives based on Bloom’s
taxonomy
Adaptation of the characterization of learning resources using educational objectives More extended use of the IBSE and use of Open Educational Resources on a daily basis. Production of more effective learning scenarios.
Organizing learning
resources into meaningful activities based on the IBSE
model Guidelines for teachers for
creating their own IBSE activities.
Characterizing resources using Educational
Objectives.
Search Multiple ways for searching: search engine with standard fields (free keywords, language, age, classification, most popular/recent/top rated), tag cloud search, search using social tags,
Extension of the IEEE LOM Standard Vocabulary for classification to cover
Contextualized attention metadata related recommended systems, tag clouds with classification, towards finding, not searching Development of more advanced searching
mechanisms with more focus on social tagging, adaptation of science vocabulary in the IEEE LOM standard Vocabulary.
Easy-to-use/access - towards finding, not searching Search through tags
science curricula.
Context-sensitive metadata
Metadata IEEE LOM application profile: adaptation
for Science resources; ASK-LOM tool -> Online tool Extension to include Educational
Objectives and Science Vocabulary
Metadata will move towards semantic web
approaches ; Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR) More compact sets of metadata to encourage their
use from teachers
IEEE LOM/MLR adapted for
your repository’s context, Easy-to-use Online metadata tool based on our
research on users search behavior, contextualized for users’ needs
Open/Structured pathways that connect formal and informal learning following IBSE model
More open ways to combine resources into Educational mashups or playlists
Open/Structured/Advanced pathways following IBSE Model
Social tagging Open tags, contextualized tagging (e.g. tagging by educational objectives
Folksonomies will be used along-side with domain specific vocabularies for searching OER
Open and contextualized tagging
PDA Support QR-codes, social tagging tool for smart phones, game- based applications that support museum visits.
Context-aware features (in-door positioning; radio-frequency identification; media to smartphones via sound) More extended use of PDA tagging tools and
applications during museum visits.
QR-codes, Mobile Social tagging tool, Context-aware features
Community building Social tagging, sharing in facebook/twitter,
OSR awareness, validation and research workshops and summer schools
Social networks within repository portals,
sharing in popular social networks
Promotion in Social
networks within repository portals, sharing in popular social networks
instruments such as Rating, Disclaimer, Commenting tool etc.; automatic quality for trusted organizations
Towards community controlled quality; automatic quality assessment (for resources, for tags);
recommender systems; earning credits for contributing to quality,
User-oriented and automatic quality
instruments alongside with checking of content (ratings, recommender
systems, etc.)
Further, it should be discussed whether OER stakeholders should just promote their offers on the
educational market or whether it is necessary to put policies in place. Further projects should provide policy-level awareness instruments to increase the knowledge and visibility of OER for policy makers. OER were seen as very useful in development work and for global collaboration (not in a sense of product export but as artefacts for collaboration such as collaborative teaching across continents). This opportunity should also be explored further.
References
Duval, E. (2005), “LearnRank the Real Quality Measure for Learning Materials,” Policy and Innovation in
Education—Quality Criteria, pp. 457-463, European Schoolnet, 2005.
Falk J.H. & Needham M.D. (2011), Measuring the impact of a science center on its community, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(1), 2011, 1-12.
Forehand, M. (2005). Bloom's taxonomy: Original and revised.. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved <insert date>, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/ ISO (2006) ISO/IEC 24730-1:2006, Information technology -- Real-time locating systems (RTLS) -- Part 1: Application program interface (API), Retrieved 30.3.2012 from: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=38840
Kastis, N. (2011). The OSR Learning Strategies and Development Perspectives. Matsuo, Y. Mori, J. Hamasaki, M. Ishida, K. Nishimura, T. Takeda, H. Hasida, K. and Ishizuka, M. “Polyphonet: An Advanced Social Network Extraction System from the Web,” Proc. 15th Int’l Conf. World Wide Web (WWW ’06), pp. 397-406, 2006. Ochoa X. & Duval E. (2009) Quantitative analysis of learning
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boost the adoption of eLearning resources - Discription of Work, European Commission CIP-Pilot actions, Grant agreement no: 297229.
Annex 1: Science Learning Content Vocabulary for th e “Classification” Element of the OSR Educational Met adata Structure
Astronomy
Asteroid belt
Asteroids
Astrobiology
Astrometry
Astronauts
Astroseismology
Atmospheres
Aurora
Big Bang
Binary stars
Black holes
Brown dwarfs
Comets
Comets and meteors
Constellations
Coordinates
Cosmic background radiation
Cosmic rays
Cosmology
Crater
Dark energy
Dark matter
Density waves
Dust
Dwarf galaxies
Earth
Eclipses
Einstein ring
Elliptical galaxy
Escape velocity
Extrasolar planets
Extraterrestrial life
Formation
Galactic wind
Galaxies
Galaxy clusters
Gamma ray bursts
Gas
Giants
Globular clusters
Gravitational lenses
Halos
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
HII region
Hubble expansion
Inflation
Intergalactic medium
Interstellar medium
Irregular galaxy
Jets
Kuiper belt objects
Light curve
Lunar eclipse
Main sequence
Mass loss
Meteor
Meteorite
Microlensing effect
Milky Way
Moon
Near-earth objects
Nebula
Neutron stars
Nucleosynthesis
Open clusters
Orbit
Origin and evolution of the universe
Orrery
Phases
Phases of the Moon
Planetary nebula
Planets
Pulsars
Quasars
Redshift
Rockets
Rotation curve
Satellites: natural satellites
Satellites: artificial satellites
Seasons
Solar activity
Solar eclipse
Solar system
Solar system - other
Solar-terrestrial relations
Space flight
Space ships
Space stations
Spiral galaxy
Star chart
Stars
Sun
Sunspots
Supernova
Supernova remnants
Theory of relativity
Tides
Universe – generally
Variable stars
Zodiac
Zodiacal light
Atoms and molecules
Atomic structure
Atoms – generally
Bonding – generally
Covalent bonds
Electrons – generally
Ionic bonds
Molecules – generally
Nucleus: protons, neutrons
Other types of bonding
Role of electrons in reactions
Changing materials
Burning
Chemical changes
Physical changes
Solubility
Water cycle
States of matter
Chemical reactions
Acids, alkalis and bases
Catalysts
Conservation of mass
Displacement reactions
Enzymes
Equations and formulae
Exo/endothermic
Oxidation and reaction
Patterns in reactions
Reaction rates
Reactions with metals
Reactivity series
Reversible reactions
Thermal decomposition
Earth science
Atmosphere and oceans: biosphere
Chemical weathering
Igneous rocks
Lithosphere and tectonic processes
Metamorphic rocks
Physical weathering
Rock formation - generally
Rocks and soils - generally
Sedimentary rocks
Weathering - generally
Electricity and magnetism
AC/DC
Ampere's Law
Charge
Circuits - generally
Components in circuits: batteries, etc
Coulomb law
Domestic appliances
Electric charge - generally
Electric current
Electric motors
Electrical heating and costs
Electrical quantities - generally
Electrical resistance/conductivity
Electricity generation/National Grid
Electromagnetism - generally
Electrostatic forces
Electrostatic phenomena and uses
Generators and transformers
Magnetic materials
Magnetism - generally
Mains electricity - generally
Mains electricity safety
Maxwell's equations
Parallel circuits
Series circuits
Voltage
Elements, compounds and mixtures
Alkali metals
Chromatography
Compounds - generally
Distillation
Elements
Filtration
Halogens
Mixtures
Noble gases
Periodic table
Separation - generally
Separation - other
Transition metals
Energy
Conduction, convection and evaporation
Conservation and dissipation
Energy - using electricity
Energy resources
Energy transfer and storage
Kinetic energy
Potential energy
Radiation
Radiation transfer
Temperature and heat
Thermodynamics
Work and power
Energy and nutrient transfer
Biomass
Carbon and nitrogen cycles
Energy and ecosystems
Food as fuel
Food chains and webs
Environment
Adaptation and competition
Biodiversity
Care of animals/plants/habitats
Interdependence
Micro-organisms
Pollution
Population abundance
Predation
Sustainable development
Fields
Central field
Conservative force field
Electric field
Electromagnetic field
Gravitational field
Magnetic field
Potential
Forces and motion
Acceleration
Air resistance
Angular acceleration
Angular velocity
Centre of mass
Circular motion
Collision
Combining forces
Conservation of momentum
Elastic collision
Electric force
Escape velocity
Foucault pendulum
Friction
Gravitational force and gravity
Horizontal throw
Impulse
Inelastic collision
Inertia
Kepler's laws
Lorentz force
Machines
Magnetic force
Mass
Moment of inertia
Moments
Newton's laws
Nuclear force
Oscillations
Pendulum
Period
Phase
Pressure
Rectilinear motion
Rigid body
Rotation
Universal law of gravitation
Velocity
Vertical throw
Weight
Green plants
Flowering plants/life cycle/parts of plants
Photosynthesis
Plant nutrition and growth
Seeds
Transport and water in plants
Humans and other animals
Aerobic and anaerobic respiration
Breathing
Circulatory system - blood
Circulatory system - heart
Enzymes in digestion
Eyes
Fetal development
Growth and life cycle
Homeostasis
Hormones - generally
Hormones and fertility
Human health - generally
Human health: alcohol
Human health: bacteria/viruses
Human health: defence mechanisms, including immunisation
Human health: diet
Human health: medicines
Human health: other harmful substances, including drugs
Human health: smoking
Human health: teeth
Insulin
Menstrual cycle
Nervous system - generally
Nutrition and digestion - generally
Puberty/adolescence
Reproductive system
Senses
Skeleton and muscles
Stimulus and response
Stomach acid and bile
Transport of reactants/products
Life processes
Biotechnology
Cell processes - generally
Cell structure
Cell types - generally
Cell types - other
Chromosomes
Epithelial
Fertilisation
Meiosis
Mitosis
Organs
Ova
Parts of the body
Root hair
Sperm
Tissues
Light
Colour
Light sources
Properties of light - generally
Reflection
Refraction
Refraction Index
Vision
Obtaining and using materials
Electrolysis
Extraction of metal from ore
Fossil fuels
Fossil resources - generally
Hydrocarbons
Metals - generally
Nitrogenous fertilizers
Plastics/polymers
Useful substances from rocks and minerals
Radioactivity
Alpha radiation
Background radiation
Beta radiation
Gamma radiation
Half-life
Nuclear decay
Nuclear fission
Nuclear fusion
Uses of radioactivity, including radioactive dating
Scientific enquiry
Analogies
Application of science - generally
Asking questions
Benefits and drawbacks of scientific/technological developments
Choosing equipment
Contexts for science
Creativity in science
Experimental models
Fairness of test/comparison
Ideas and evidence in science
Identifying patterns/anomalies
Misconceptions
Prediction compared to results
Primary information
Recognising limitations of evidence/data/assumptions
Recording observations/measurements
Safety
Scientific communication
Scientific investigations - generally
Scientific prediction
Secondary information
SI units
Using or evaluating a technique
Using science to explain
Solids, liquids and gases
Changes of state
Density
Gas pressure and diffusion
Grouping materials
Melting/boiling points
Particle theory
Properties of materials
Sound
Audible ranges
Hearing - generally
Hearing: noise
Loudness
Pitch
Properties of sound - generally
Sound sources
Speed in media
The ear
Ultrasound
Tools for science
Accelerometers
Detectors
Detectors: CCD camera
Dynamometers
Fieldwork equipment
Laboratory equipment - generally
Laboratory glassware
Laboratory measuring instruments, including sensors and meters
Microscope
Observatories
Sensors
Thermometers
Useful materials and products
Everyday materials
Variation, inheritance and evolution
Asexual reproduction
Classification/keys
Cloning, selective breeding and genetic engineering
DNA
Environmental causes of variation
Evolution - generally
Extinction
Fossil record
Genetic causes of variation and mutation
Inheritance - generally
Inherited diseases
Monohybrid inheritance
Sex determination
Variation - generally
Waves
Diffraction
Doppler effect
Electromagnetic spectrum
Gamma rays
Information transmission, analogue and digital signals
