D-1.4 OSR Second Annual Report
1
Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045
OpenScienceResources: Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for
Formal and Informal Science Education www.openscienceresources.eu - www.osrportal.eu
OSR Second Annual Report
June 2010 – May 2011
Deliverable number/name D-1.4 OSR Second Annual Report
Dissemination level Public
Delivery date July 2011
Status Final
Authors
Marzia Mazzonetto (Ecsite); Jennifer
Palumbo (Ecsite); Sofoklis Sotiriou
(Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Eleftheria
Tsourlidaki (Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Fotis
Kouris (Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Kati
Clements (JYU); Kati Tyystjärvi (Heureka)
eContentplus
This project is funded under the eContentplus programme1,
a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and
exploitable.
1 OJ L 79, 24.3.2005, p. 1.
D-1.4 OSR Second Annual Report
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Table of Contents
1 THE OSR PROJECT AT A GLANCE ....................................................................................................... 4
1.1 OSR Q&A ....................................................................................................................................... 4 1.2 OSR AND ME ................................................................................................................................... 6 1.3 THE OSR CONSORTIUM AT A GLANCE .................................................................................................... 9
2 PROJECT RESULTS/ACHIEVEMENTS ............................................................................................... 11
2.1 THE CHRONICLE OF OSR ................................................................................................................... 11
3 THE OSR EDUCATIONAL CONTENT ................................................................................................. 14
3.1 TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COMMON DIGITAL REPOSITORY FOR FORMAL AND INFORMAL SCIENCE
EDUCATION.............................................................................................................................................. 14 3.2 DESCRIPTION OF THE OSR LEARNING OBJECTS ...................................................................................... 14 3.3 DESCRIPTION OF THE OPEN SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS ................................................................ 15 3.4 OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES EDUCATIONAL CONTENT .............................................................................. 18 3.5 EXAMPLES OF LEARNING OBJECTS AVAILABLE ........................................................................................ 29
4 TARGETED USERS AND ACTIVITIES ................................................................................................. 35
5 IMPACT & SUSTAINABILITY ............................................................................................................ 38
5.1 OSR IMPACT TO THE TARGET GROUPS ................................................................................................. 38 5.2 IMPACT TO THE SCHOOL COMMUNITIES ............................................................................................... 38 5.3 IMPACT TO THE MUSEUM VISITORS ..................................................................................................... 40 5.4 IMPACT TO THE MUSEUM EDUCATORS ................................................................................................ 40 5.5 SUSTAINABILITY OF OSR APPROACH .................................................................................................... 42 5.6 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE PORTAL .......................................................................................................... 42 5.7 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE OSR SERVICES ................................................................................................. 42 5.8 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE OSR USER BASE ............................................................................................... 42
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List of Figures
Figure 1 Success indicators 31.3.2011 ................................................................................................... 12
Figure 2: View of the “Propose preliminary explanation or Hypothesis” step in the pre-visit phase of a
structured pathway. All the supporting materials are listed below the respective text and are also
linked to the text. .................................................................................................................................. 16
Figure 3: The organization of the different stages of a structured pathway. ....................................... 16
Figure 4: The OSR Repository facilities allow users to search for educational content and learning
activities, as well as to upload their own content in order to share it with others and to develop their
own learning activities .......................................................................................................................... 18
Figure 5: By using Second Life users may visit Foucault’s pendulum at the OSR are in Ellinogermaniki
Agogi island and learn about Foucault’s experiment, watch related videos as well as various observe
images illustrating pendulums around the world. ................................................................................ 19
Figure 6: This figure indicates the information provided from the OSR portal for every educational
pathway and learning object ................................................................................................................. 20
Figure 7: Content in the OSR Database March 2011 ............................................................................. 21
Figure 8: OSR Repository Content Growth ............................................................................................ 21
Figure 9: OSR Content User Rating ........................................................................................................ 22
Figure 10: OSR Users ............................................................................................................................. 23
Figure 11: Users Contributing Content in the OSR Repository. 281 users out of 974 have contributed
some form of content ........................................................................................................................... 24
Figure 12: Number of Items per Language including those available in two or more languages. ........ 24
Figure 13: Distribution of Content by Age -Range ................................................................................ 25
Figure 14: Types of Content .................................................................................................................. 25
Figure 15: Number of tags added per contributing user. It is of interest to notice that one user has
added 1157 tags another one 527 while the majority (73 users) have added only 1 tag. ................... 26
Figure 16: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository without Free Tags ......................... 27
Figure 17: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository ....................................................... 27
Figure 18: Number of Tags per Learning Object. The majority of objects have 4 and less tags. .......... 28
Figure 19: The Collections for Human Physiology from Ciencia Viva ..…………………………………………….. 28
Figure 20: The Collections from Eugenides Foundation on light ……………………………………………………… 29
Figure 21: The Collections from La Cite on climate and pollution …………………………………………………… 30
Figure 22: An extract from the structured educational pathway of the History of Atom ………………… 31
Figure 23: number and origin of OSR portal page visits at its first birthday (from February 2010 to
February 2011) ...................................................................................................................................... 36
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1 The OSR Project at a Glance
The Open Science Resources (OSR) First Annual Report describes the overall context and
objectives of the OSR project. In this Second Annual Report we introduce two new aspects:
the “OSR Q&A”, meant to help all users easily familiarize with the OSR project, and the “OSR
and Me” section, created to help interested users understand the unique advantages that
the OSR portal offers them and how they can get involved.
The OSR project has been running successfully for two full years and is scheduled to
continue one more year until 2012. In this second year of activity, the consortium has
succeeded to reach all of its objectives on many fronts, especially with respect to the
uploading of content, in terms of resources and social tags, to the OSR portal, which is the
main output produced by the consortium. Efforts to disseminate the project have been
widespread and complete thanks to the strong leadership provided by the coordinator,
Ecsite (the European Network of Science Centre and Museums, with 400 members across
Europe), and strongly supported by the consortium. As more and more users get involved in
the fast growing OSR portal, it is now more important than ever that they are given the
opportunity to quickly and easily understand what the project is about and how they can get
involved. In the following paragraphs these explanations are given in one of the most user-
friendly formats used to connect with all types of users: the “Questions&Answers” list and
the “OSR and Me” page.
1.1 OSR Q&A
What is OSR?
OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES (OSR) is a collaborative project co-funded by the European
Commission under the eContentplus programme. The project started in June 2009 and will
continue for 36 months. The aim of the OSR project is to create a shared repository of
scientific digital objects – currently dispersed in European science museums and science
centres - to make them more widely and coherently available, searchable and usable in the
context of formal and informal learning situations. The Open Science Resources (OSR) portal
enables you to access the finest digital collections in European science centres and
museums, to follow educational pathways connecting objects tagged with semantic
metadata and to enrich the contents provided with social tags of your own choice. To access
the OSR portal, visit www.osrportal.eu and sign in for free.
What can I find on the OSR portal?
The OSR portal includes numerous educational materials, organised in learning objects
(images of exhibits and scientific instruments, animations, videos, lesson plans, student
projects and many other formats) and educational pathways (collections of educational
materials meant to provide a comprehensive learning experience for a variety of situations.
Structured learning pathways are meant for forma learning groups, for example in a school
setting. These pathways guide the educator to take a series of steps that involve different
stages of learning and involvement starting from the preparation phase through to the
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follow-up after the main block of activities with guidelines for interactive museum visit
experiences). Structured learning pathways can be used as lesson plans on a certain topic,
adapted to a specific group of learners defined by age or level of experience. Open learning
pathways, on the other hand, are less structured groupings of educational resources. These
pathways are meant to allow users to collect the resources they find meaningful or
interesting either by theme, by user group, or by any other means, for use in a variety of
learning situations.
OSR is a highly accessible portal, presented through an easy and attractive interface and
equipped with state of the art searching tools. The OSR portal is aimed at different user
groups: students, teachers, families, museum visitors and general visitors. All users can
navigate between the finest digital collections in European science centres and museums,
guided by attractive educational pathways connecting the objects with well-defined
semantic metadata. Users can also enrich the contents provided with social tags of their own
choice. OSR learning materials form Educational Pathways which are presented as a storyline
connecting different objects, which may be physically kept in different European museums.
Which are the innovative aspects of OSR?
OSR is the first project aimed at gathering extremely valuable educational resources which
mix together different types of approaches and locations. An impressive abundance of high
quality digital content is normally stored in different repositories across Europe. However,
these resources remain largely unexploited due to a number of barriers such as the lack of
interoperability between repositories or multi-lingual issues. The Open Science Resources
(OSR) project presents a coordinated solution at a European level to make digital content
easily available to teachers and schools groups as well as science communication
professionals and the general public. Through the OSR portal you will be able to learn about
science through learning materials coming from museums / science centres all over Europe,
which offer a unique social context for learning. Innovation in the OSR portal starts by
encouraging user engagement with the museums and science centers content.
Why should I trust the OSR contents?
Reliable and highly experienced science centres and museums from across Europe have
joined forces to provide high-quality learning resources for the OSR portal. The OSR leading
science centres and museums have shared together a series of digital resources that are
normally available on their premises and from their individual websites. These resources are
designed to be adaptable to different learning situations, ranging from the formal classroom-
based education to the informal context, for instance in the science centre.
How is the OSR project contributing to the eContentplus priorities?
The unique competitive advantage of museums is that they can provide their visitors with
the real world context and the exploratory experiences that constructivists are advocating.
Through such enhanced opportunities to interact with scientific content, all Europeans
(students of all ages, teachers of all levels, researchers in the fields of science, history, or
culture, as well as the general public) can achieve more profound experiences from their
encounters with science education objects and hopefully become more oriented towards a
science culture that can make Europe a world leader in the highly competitive fields of
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science and technology. The OSR project will add its contribution towards these directions
by enhancing the status quo of digital science education content in Europe.
1.2 OSR and Me
Whether you are a student or a teacher, a museum visitor or educator or an internet user
just stopping by to take a look at the OSR portal, there are several ways in which you can get
involved with the portal, both to use its contents and to contribute to its development.
Searching...
The OSR portal contains educational material in the form of educational objects (images of
exhibits and scientific instruments, videos, animations, exercises, graphs, links) and of
educational pathways (structured and open learning activities organized according the
inquiry based pedagogical model). Users can search for the educational materials in the
"Explore OSR" section. The approach adopted aims to make the process of retrieving
information and resources as unobtrusive and intuitive as possible, in order to enhance the
user experience. The user-interfaces developed are multi-lingual by design and supports
both visit access mode and web access mode, so you can use the portal either from your
computer or from your PDA, directly inside the museum.
...and Uploading
Users can upload their own materials to the OSR Repository, using the "Share your Content"
section. Share your content: the OSR Tool-Box will provide you with all the necessary tools to
prepare your content for the OSR Repository. The OSR portal offers a unique authoring
environment to design and share your own educational materials, or use existing materials
to build your own pathways.
Social Tagging
User engagement with the museums and science centers content is encouraged through
social tagging of the educational objects and pathways. This is one of OSR's main innovative
points, since it provides a bridge between the education and collection staff in the museums
and the visitors, by allowing the visitors to share their experience with the exhibits. Tagging
lets users assert their own connections and associations between objects and phenomena in
ways that reflect personal perspectives and interests. Tagging further enables re-discovery
of activities previously performed; the users' tags record salient characteristics of personal
interest and support subsequent searches.
OSR goes mobile
Users can also have access to the OSR repository through mobile phones and PDA’s. Access
through mobile phones is especially useful, as museum visitors have the opportunity to use
the content from the portal during their visit to various exhibits. Moreover, the MoOSR
section currently includes 4 applications in English and in Greek that are especially designed
to be used through mobile phones. Six more mobile applications are in preparation and will
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be uploaded shortly. The applications are designed in html format, therefore removing the
obstacle of Flash and its incompatibility with the i-Phone and i-PAD.
OSR’s virtual life
Visit the OSR Camp in Second Life! Explore the Foucault's Pendulum interactive exhibit and
numerous other contents of the OSR Repository through a unique immersive experience in a
realistic context. From here you can download and install Second Life Viewer which is used
for entering the Sciences Camp in Second Life. Teleport to Sciences Camp.
The unique advantages of the OSR portal
These are some of the several unique advantages of the OSR portal which make it
particularly valuable for a wide variety of publics. Take a look at the following paragraphs:
you will for sure find at least one good reason to start navigating through the OSR portal!
I am a student and I would find it really helpful to have some extra resources to better
understand science topics. I wish our teachers would take us to a science centre...
The OSR Repository includes numerous educational materials (images of exhibits and
scientific instruments, animations, videos, lesson plans, student projects and educational
pathways with guidelines for interactive museum visit experiences). OSR offers young people
the opportunity to use several digital resources online (including interactive multimedia
applications) from science museums and science centres in the framework of their normal
school curriculum. Moreover, it contributes to the access to and sharing of advanced tools,
services and learning resources not only between schools, but also among science museums
and centres.
The OSR Portals allows people worldwide to access the high-quality educational materials
developed within science centres and museums in Europe. This enables users who live far
from a science centre or museum to benefit from the knowledge built in these institutions;
furthermore, learning pathways can be created by users themselves and are then shared
among the international community.
I am a teacher interested in new interactive resources for science learning, but I have never
been to a science centre...
The OSR portal comprises a wealth of learning pathways, which are structured collections of
educational materials and activities that can be used by teachers to put together lesson
plans about a specific topic or theme. These are linked with the school curricula in the
various countries of the project to enhance the value of the resources and the intercultural
understanding of the partners.
OSR demonstrates the need for the development of Learning Design Repositories (instead of
just digital repositories). It supports the teachers, both experienced and recently assigned, to
follow specific learning design approaches when delivering their instruction. It is not only
acting as a repository of materials but also as an effective training tool for the teachers and
the museum educators. Besides, the consortium includes some of the most prominent
content providers in the field, technology experts, pedagogical experts, educational policy
makers and standardization bodies and user communities throughout Europe.
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The Open Science Resources Educational Pathways span a wide range of subject matters and
target audiences in order to cover a variety of users’ needs. For example, the needs and
objectives of an individual teacher in terms of content can vary considerably from day to
day. A teacher may search for content for classroom use, for lesson planning, for home study
or for supporting a visit to a science museum. Each of these scenarios requires customized
content with distinct characteristics. The selected materials are linked to the school
curriculum, including guidelines and sample worksheets for the students, as well as
references and additional information.
I am a museum expert interested in new ways of collaborating with other
museums/science centres, sharing experiences and finding new ways to reach out to
audiences...
The Open Science Resources system provides a test bed for sharing best practices and
educational activities about the learning experiences offered by museums to both on-site
and on-line visitors. In the framework of the proposed activities, virtual and physical visitors
of the participating institutions are able to personalize a set of resources for reference and
problem solving. The museum experts help users work independently, co-operatively and in
an increasingly self-organized way. This is achieved by organizing field trips for schools that
are tangential to the curriculum, pre- and post-visit activities for other categories of visitors,
problem-solving approaches, ‘minds-on’ experiments and models of different kinds into
everyday life, heavily involving “real-reality” experiments in the “user-friendly” and engaging
environment of the science museum. The field trips act as best practices and demonstrators
that enable users to follow their individual pathway of learning. During these activities the
initial predictions of the visitors can be compared with data of the different experiments that
they have the chance to realise.
The Open Science Resources approach supports the work of the science museum design and
development team to innovate the exhibition. The explanatory and additional materials that
currently accompany the exhibits are produced for general use and they are presented to all
the different visitors’ categories.
I am interested in learning about science in a new interactive way but I am neither a
student nor a teacher and I never have the possibility to go to a science centre...
The OSR Portal allows people worldwide to access the high-quality educational materials
developed within science centres and museums in Europe. This enables users who live far
from a science centre or museum to benefit from the knowledge built in these institutions;
furthermore, learning pathways can be created by users themselves and are then shared
among the international community.
The Open Science Resources approach facilitates lifelong learning as it aims to improve
quality of learning by providing access to resources and services with significant educational
value. It supports the development of a better understanding of the role of science in society
and bringing science and scientific subjects closer to the citizen. The Open Science Resources
portal offers the opportunity to all publics to use numerous online digital resources
(including interactive multimedia applications) from science museums and science centres.
Moreover, it contributes to the access to and sharing of advanced tools, services and
learning resources which are normally accessible only through an exchange between schools
or among science museums and centres. Furthermore, the Open Science Resources
approach helps learners develop critical capacity and deeper understanding of the concepts
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underlying scientific investigation. The Open Science Resources approach aims at promoting
people’s interest in science by building on the strengths of both formal and informal
learning.
1.3 The OSR Consortium at a glance
The consortium that implements the OSR project includes a balanced mix of science
museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts,
user groups and standardization bodies.
Ecsite, the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, based in Belgium, is the
project coordinator.
The following organisations form the consortium:
∼ Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur - Austria
∼ Menon Network - Belgium
∼ Ellinogermaniki Agogi - Greece
∼ University of Bayreuth - Germany
∼ Lambrakis Foundation - Greece
∼ Deutsches Museum - Germany
∼ Heureka, The Finnish Science Centre - Finland
∼ Eugenides Foundation - Greece
∼ National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci - Italy
∼ Etablissement Public du Palais de la Découverte et de la Cité des Sciences et de
l'Industrie (Universcience) - France
∼ Palace of Miracles - Hungary
∼ Pavilion of Knowledge - Ciencia Viva, Portugal
∼ INTRASOFT Intl. - Luxembourg
∼ Linnaeus University - Sweden
∼ IKnowHow - Greece
∼ University of Jyväskylä - Finland
∼ Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education - USA
∼ University of Central Florida - USA
∼ The Science Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University - Taiwan, RoC
Several science centres and museums from the Ecsite network and beyond have expressed
an interest to interact with the OSR portal, either by taking part in the training seminars
organised by the project partners, or by contributing educational resources to the portal.
The centres and museums that have already become affiliated with the OSR project are the
following:
∼ Bibliotheca Alexandrina ALEXploratorium, Alexandria, Egypt
∼ Cite de Sciences a Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia
∼ Technopolis, Mechelen, Belgium
∼ Haus der Natur, Salzburg, Austria
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∼ Centro Ciência Viva, Aveiro, Portugal
∼ Ustanova Hiša eksperimentov, Ljubljana, Slovenia
∼ Domus - Museos Científicos Coruñeses, A Coruña, Spain
∼ Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
∼ Science Centre AHHAA Foundation, Tartu, Estonia
∼ Centro Ciência Viva de Bragança, Braganca, Portugal
∼ Centro Ciência Viva Rómulo de Carvalho, Coimbra, Portugal
∼ Formicablu srl, Bologna, Italy
∼ Centro Ciência Viva Porto Moniz (Ilha da Madeira), Porto Moniz, Portugal
∼ Exploratório, Centro Ciência Viva de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
∼ Thinktank, Birmingham, UK
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2 Project Results/Achievements
In this section the project’s most important second year achievements are described, in
order to give readers a clear understanding of how they can use and benefit directly the
project development.
The OSR project is working successfully and exceeding expectations during its second year of
life, achieving most of its goals already before deadlines. The biggest challenges for the
second year have been connected with the technical improvements of the portal, which are
carried out quickly once the requirements are expressed by the consortium and the users.
Moreover, at the end of the year the foreseen improvements seem to be well underway.
The communication processes within the consortium have clearly improved since the first
year and the participation of the museum partners has been made more active, e.g. two
museum partners (HEUREKA, universcience) participate in the main decisions about the
project life and implementation.
2.1 The Chronicle of OSR
The OSR consortium includes some of the most prominent content providers in the field, as
well as technology experts, pedagogical experts, educational policy makers, standardization
bodies and user communities throughout Europe. The OSR partners come from 12 European
countries, covering a vast percentage of the European population. The physical visitors of
the 7 participating science centres and museums count on more than 4,000,000 visitors per
year while the virtual visitors through their web sites and digital repositories are
approaching 5,000,000. The consortium is coordinated by Ecsite, the European network of
Science Centres and Museums with about 400 member institutions in 30 European countries
(www.ecsite.eu). Through a systematic dissemination approach that includes a variety of
events and actions, Ecsite expands the impact of the project’s work to member institutions
in all member states. Additionally, the consortium includes partners from the USA and
Taiwan, who also contribute to the dissemination of the project outside the EU.
A great example of the strong capacity for dissemination in the consortium is the prize as
best paper for the OSR presentation in the EDEN 2010 conference titled: “Open Learning for
Science Education - The Richness of European Science Centres and Museums Connected to
Users and Learners Worldwide”. The OSR approach also earned the project the silver award
at the IMS Learning Impact Award. This award was given out in Long Beach, California on 16-
19 May 2011, in an event organized by the IMS Global Learning Consortium.
The OSR project development is constantly monitored by a Quality Assurance Team through
a set of success indicators. An overview of the project’s success indicators after the second
year can be seen in Figure 1. These success indicators were gathered on 31st
of May 2011,
End of Month 24.
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Figure 1: Success indicators 31.5.2011.
Objective -
expected result Indicators
Expected at
Year 2 (M24)
Actual at
M22 (31
March 2011)
Aggregate and make
interoperable a
critical mass of
content
Content (Learning
Pathways) 50 138
Content (Learning
Objects) 500 768
Social tags 5000 6732
Increase in use of
underlying content
Organization of
Training Workshops
(Summer Schools)
14 (2)
15 + 1
summer, 2
winter
schools
Organization of
validation
workshops
10 22
Users involved in
the trials
(requirements
elicitation, testing
and validation)
200
1628 (WP3) +
356 (WP6) =
1984
Affiliated Partners
(mainly science
centres and
museums)
5 15
EU Country
Coverage 27 27
Dissemination
Presentations in
conferences and
workshops
15 23(M18)+
11(M22) = 34
Publications in
scientific magazines 3
6 (M18)+ 5
(M22) = 13
Organization of
dissemination
workshops and
conferences
4 19 (M18)+ 5
(M24) = 24
Organization of
dissemination
events and “Open
Science Days”
5 4 (M18)+ 3
(M24) = 7
Participation to EC
clustering activities
(organization of
clustering events)
4(2) 6 (M18)+ 2
(M24) = 8
OSR Portal (single)
hits 30,000
138,812
pageviews;
15,942 visits
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Looking at the success indicator table after the second year, it is possible to draw
conclusions on how well the work has advanced. Overall, the OSR project has achieved
better results than foreseen in terms of most of its success indicators already two months
before the end of the second year. Therefore, the project can be said to be proceeding on
track. The number of affiliated science centres and museums will increase even more by the
end of the reporting period, since Ecsite will organise a workshop at the Ecsite Annual
Conference (May 25th 2011) with science centres and museum from across Europe to
involve new science centres and museums.
The OSR project’s main task is to produce the OSR Portal, a set of customizable learning-
oriented resources and services reliably offered through the web sites of science centres and
museums, school portals, visualization environments and other online education publishing
services. The portal hosts the metadata of learning objects allowing open discovery for the
users. The OSR project’s goal is to provide a service, which users can rely on and trust – this
cannot be achieved without quality assurance of the content. After the second year of the
project, the OSR consortium has taken several measures to assure the quality of the content
in the OSR portal, which include naming a group of content reviewers in charge of the
technical review of the materials online and introducing the possibility for users to report
inappropriate content through a dedicated button.
The OSR consortium is also working on the quality assurance of the content from a
community approach. This is achieved by following the specific quality approach based on
the ISO 19796-2 standard (ISO/IEC, 2009), but specific quality instruments will be used to
complete this measure. These quality instruments include a combination of community-
based mechanisms and quality control contributed by the project partners. During the
second year of the project, the quality assurance process for the content in the OSR portal
was implemented, this chapter talks about what was done since the end of the first year and
also outlines the new actions the consortium proposes to take in order to assure the quality
of social tags in the portal.
Quality management of content is well on its way and the project is further developing a
sustainable quality assurance procedure including both user based mechanisms and a quality
certificate of the project that is given to users/organizations who are providing high quality
materials. Trusted organizations such as the project partners can automatically upload
content which gets the OSR Technical Review Certificate. This is the first step towards
sustainability of the quality approach that OSR is implementing. The OSR project has also
taken steps to identify possible measures for assuring the quality of the social tags which
users can attach to OSR resources and pathways. This approach will be further defined in the
last annual quality report (3rd year).
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3 The OSR Educational Content
3.1 Towards the Development of a Common Digital Repository for Formal
and Informal Science Education
This chapter aims to present the Open Science Resources (OSR) content that is currently
stored in the OSR Repository (http://www.osrportal.eu/). The OSR Portal contains
educational material divided into two main categories. The first category is the learning
objects. Learning objects include collections of photos from museum exhibits, videos,
animations, exercises, graphs, guides, presentations, worksheets for students and numerous
other types of objects. The second pillar of the OSR portal content is a collection of
educational pathways that are divided into two categories. The first category addresses the
needs of formal learning. They are organized according to the Inquiry based teaching model
and especially designed to complement school visits (physical or virtual) to a museum or
science centre (structured lesson plans). The second category of learning activities involves
activities designed in a more unstructured manner (open lesson plans) so as to meet the
needs of informal learning during a visit to a museum or science centre.
3.2 Description of the OSR Learning Objects
A large amount of digital educational content has become available worldwide in the form of
online collections, digital repositories and libraries. This large amount of digital educational
content has the potential to support technology-enhanced learning. On the other hand, the
creation of quality educational resources is a costly process. Hence, reuse of high quality
learning materials has become a very important research topic for a variety of people,
organizations etc., as it can lead to an important reduction of development cost and time,
while at the same time it can improve the quality of technology-enhanced learning.
The OSR Portal aspires to become one of the main repositories of digital educational content
and a technology enhanced learning hub. For this purpose it is constantly enriched with high
quality content from the museums/science centers that are part of the OSR consortium but
also, and this is very important, by user generated content from its numerous users. The
digital educational content of OSR is indexed and stored in a way that facilitates reusability
and synthesis in structured ways (Educational Pathways) to promote both formal and
informal learning.
OSR educational content includes but is not limited to, photos, guides, simulations,
animations, tutorials, diagrams, audio and video clips, quizzes and assessments. OSR
educational content is far more than a pool of material for the user to select and present, it
has been created and characterized in such a way that it has been transformed into a
learning object. The main difference between a learning object and an information object is
that the learning object is designed to support a concrete educational goal: that is, it is
associated with one or more educational objectives.
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Moreover, each of the OSR learning objects has been enhanced with educational metadata
so that it becomes more accessible, better searchable and (re-)usable. OSR is using two sets
of metadata i) standardized using the IEEE LOM standard and ii) metadata directly
contributed by the end-user without making used of a standard, i.e. ‘social metadata’-social
tags as they are commonly known.
3.3 Description of the Open Science Educational Pathways
The term ‘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. Further, educational
pathways directly serve the priority assigned by the project to the integration of resources
scattered in various science museums/centres into the same learning experience rather than
the mere selection of resources from a single museum or science centre.
At the moment, the OSR portal includes 138 educational pathways. These educational
pathways are divided into two categories. Structured pathways address formal education
needs and open pathways are designed to implement cases of informal learning. OSR
Pathways provide educators with a complete set of instructions, guidelines and supporting
materials (useful links, articles, worksheets etc.) organized in separate sections so as to guide
the educators to organize step-by-step a visit to a museum or science centre as efficiently as
possible. In order to make these visits more effective for learners, the pathways (in
particular the structured pathways) have a three-step organization, as follows:
• Pre-Visit Phase: preparing for the visit and getting acquainted with the subject
at hand.
• Visit Phase: involving interaction with digital science learning resources and
exhibits at science museum/centre.
• Post-Visit Phase: activities rounding up and concluding the learning
experience, after the visit to the museum/centre.
In each phase of a pathway, the author may attach numerous files like images, presentations
or worksheets as supporting materials. All supporting materials can be linked to the
respective text just like any other external link and thus helping the user to deploy the
supporting materials more easily.
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Figure 2: View of the “Propose preliminary explanation or Hypothesis” step in the pre-visit phase of a
structured pathway. All the supporting materials are listed below the respective text and are also
linked to the text.
A. Structured Pathways
The organization of the different phases of structured pathways is based on the Inquiry
based teaching model adjusted to implement visits to science museum/centres. More
specifically the phases of a structured pathway are illustrated in figure 3 below. In the OSR
authoring tool, which is used by the author to upload the pathway, there are respective
explanations concerning the content of each phase.
Figure 3: The organization of the different stages of a structured pathway.
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The topics of the structured pathways are all related to the school curriculum, covering
science subjects from all secondary education levels. Physics subjects like the
electromagnetic spectrum and optics in general as well as biology topics like genetics are
among the most popular among users. The collection of the OSR portal includes pathways
related to all kinds of exhibits, implementing the teaching of topics that are considered to be
quite difficult for students. For example, through the OSR portal, teachers can use Foucault’s
pendulum to teach their class about circular motion, or a replica of a DNA molecule to teach
them about connections among atoms.
B. Open Pathways
A museum educator/science communication professional, or even an experienced,
motivated end-user, selects digital learning objects and combines them to form a
meaningful, self-contained, user-friendly informal learning experience; this is the idea
behind the Open Pathway of OSR. The integration of resources scattered in various science
museums/centres into the same learning experience is a priority (as opposed to the
selection of resources from a single source, which can be the approach chosen in the case of
a structured pathway), offering to the visitor a unique informal learning experience.
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3.4 Open Science Resources Educational Content
Figure 4: The OSR Repository facilities allow users to search for educational content and learning
activities, as well as to upload their own content in order to share it with others and to develop their
own learning activities.
In the OSR repository, users can search for educational content in the form of learning
objects or educational pathways through the “Explore OSR” section or upload their own
materials, using the “Share your Content” section.
Users can also have access to the OSR repository through mobile phones
and PDA’s. Access through mobile phones is especially useful, as museum
visitors have the opportunity to use the content from the portal during
their visit to various exhibits. Moreover, the MoOSR section currently
includes 4 applications in English and in Greek that are especially designed
to be used through mobile phones. Six more mobile applications are
expected to be uploaded soon. The applications are designed in html
format removing the obstacle of Flash and its incompatibility with the i-
Phone and i-PAD.
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OSR aspires to be a single access point for the digital collections of the museums and science
centers across Europe and therefore it has to be a truly cross platform application. After the
introduction of mobile OSR for smart phones and PDAs, the consortium decided to capitalise
on the popularity of online virtual worlds and introduced OSR in Second Life (SL). Visitors can
visit the island of Ellinogermaniki Agogi in SL and experience the OSR content starting with
the Foucault’s pendulum application. Foucault’s pendulum is the first application available in
SL with more to follow.
Figure 5: By using Second Life, users may visit Foucault’s pendulum at the OSR area in Ellinogermaniki
Agogi’s island and learn about Foucault’s experiment, watch related videos as well as observe various
images illustrating pendulums around the world.
The OSR consortium understands that the numerous and diverse content available in the
repository can overwhelm the visitor, especially educators who plan to use OSR resources in
their lecture and to design learning activities. For this reason, the consortium developed
guidelines for the teacher (http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/94441), sample worksheets
for the students, as well as references and supporting information for a plethora of
educational content. Moreover the repository’s interface is designed in the most user
friendly way with much information available to the user (see Figure 6).
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Figure 6: This figure indicates the information provided in the OSR portal for every educational
pathway and learning object.
Some very interesting data signifying the potentiality of the OSR repository is presented
below. The content data available at this point in time of the development of OSR are very
optimistic. They present the growth of the repository (see figure7 and 8, table 1), the quality
of the learning objects and educational pathways (figure 9) and clearly demonstrate that
users have not only become aware of the existence of the OSR portal but are embracing it
and using it in capacity (figure 10a and 10b).
Title
User Assessment Certification
Social Tags Taggers and Insert tag option
Educational Resources
Pathway Manipulation
IPR & Contributor
Object Metadata
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Figure 7: Content in the OSR Database May 2011.
Figure 8: OSR Repository Content Growth.
Content Type Current Number
Learning Objects 762
Structured pathways 95
Open pathways 43
mobile applications 4
Social Tags 5247
Table 1: Content in the OSR Repository.
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OSR Repository Object Quality Rating
Objects not rated48%
Objects rated 3 stars12%
Objects rated 2 stars and below
1%
Objects rated 5 stars21%
Objects rated 4 stars18%
Figure 9: OSR Content User Rating.
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Figure 10a: OSR Users.
OSR Users Activated in the Last Month
892, 92%
82, 8%
Active Registered Users Accounts Activated User Accounts in the Last Month
Figure 11b: OSR Users.
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Figure 12: Users Contributing Content in the OSR Repository. 281 users out of 974 have contributed
some form of content.
Some more interesting data regarding the language that the content was created and the
age range that is suitable for, are presented in the following graphs (figure 12 and 13):
Figure 13: Number of Items per Language including those available in two or more languages.
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Figure 14: Distribution of Content by Age –Range.
The type of content in the repository is also interesting. In the OSR repository, the learning
objects can be in many forms such as text, images, videos, applications, web links, web
content, collections and more. Their distribution and nature are presented in figure 14
below:
Figure 15: Types of Content.
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The educational content of the OSR portal is not only being characterized by the author but
also from all users of the portal through the tagging system of the portal. This tagging system
allows users to characterize any learning object or educational pathway they want by using
either free terms or by choosing from a pre-defined list of terms referring to the educational
objectives of the content. Some interesting data regarding social tagging of the OSR content
are presented below in figure 15.
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 4 2 4 3 2 6 5 3 2 3 4 10 20 15 9 28 73
Nu
mb
er
of
Ta
gs
Number of Users
Number of Tags added per Contributing User
Figure 16: Number of tags added per contributing user. It is of interest to notice that one user has
added 1157 tags another one 527 while the majority (73 users) have added only 1 tag.
The extreme distribution of the number of tags for one user comes from the fact that this
particular account is from a museum curator form Ciencia Viva in Portugal who tagged all
the objects that she uploaded.
Another very important quantitative measurement gained from analysing the type of social
tags is that the majority of taggers attributed free tags to the objects. The distribution of the
type of tags added to content by users is presented in the following figure 16 and 17.
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Figure 17: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository without Free Tags.
Figure 18: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository.
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0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 3 7 5 7 5
10
12
14
37
17
53
55
95
13
2
12
5
10
6
10
2
12
8
Nu
mb
er
of
Ta
gs
Number of Objects
Number of Tags per Object
Figure 19: Number of Tags per Learning Object. The majority of objects have 4 tags or fewer.
The consortium is fortunate to have as partners museums and science centers that have
digital material of unsurpassed quality. A small example of the material that is available to
the repository is presented below together with an example of their combination in a
structured educational pathway.
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3.5 Examples of Learning Objects available
Figure 19: The Collections for Human Physiology from Ciencia Viva.
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Figure 20: The Collections from Eugenides Foundation on light.
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Figure 21: The Collections from La Cite on climate and pollution.
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Figure 22: An extract from the structured educational pathway of the History of Atom.
The first page of the pathway with
the description and metadata
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A brief introduction describing the
content and setting the context of
the pathway.
The Pre-Visit phase of the
pathway following the Inquiry
Based Science Education model of
learning.
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4 Targeted Users and Activities
This section provides a summary of the specificities of the OSR main user groups and
explains how the project addresses them through targeted activities.
The user requirement collection activities were continued during the second year of the
project in parallel to the starting of the validation activities. 14 workshops were arranged by
eight science centre/museum partners to complement the workshops already carried out in
the first year; those included 2 workshops for teachers, 8 workshops for students and 4 for
the general public visitors of the museums. The requirement gathering for the second year
brought 274 new students and 788 general visitors to the requirements user base. The
expectations (200 users) for year 1 were well exceeded.
Once the technologies were in place and partners were given the guidelines for the user
requirement and validation workshops, the project gathered a wealth of data to support the
requirements analysis and validation. In the second year of the project, the OSR
requirement/validation workshops targeted informal learners specifically, in order to fulfil
the project’s objectives and focus on having a well founded vision of the user base’s needs.
Participation and organization of dissemination events has been efficient and the objectives
for the first year were met and exceeded. Although many users in the OSR portal seem to be
coming from Greece if you observe the Google Analytics of the portal (see figure 23), this is
not surprising if we consider that three of the partners organizing events and activities with
users (Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Eugenides Foundation, Lambrakis Foundation) are based in
Greece and that the summer schools on the OSR project are held in Greece. After the first
year, the visits to the OSR portal coming from the technical partners have been excluded
from the Google Analytics report, therefore these figures have also been corrected and they
now show a more accurate analysis of the OSR portal’s user base. The average time of the
portal was 9:20 minutes and the visits had increased from year 1 (4802 visits from 69
countries -> 11 569visits from 100 countries). 56% of the users were recurring, which shows
that OSR users keep on coming back to work with the portal.
Out of the 11569 single visits, about 329 are coming through mobile devices. Although the
PDA version of the portal is currently in the last stages of preparation, we can observe that
these mobile users are spending about 3, 5 minutes on the portal, which means that there is
a need for the PDA and those users seem highly motivated to use the OSR portal.
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Figure 23: number and origin of OSR portal page visits from February 2010 to May 2011.
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5 Impact & Sustainability
This section highlights the first results from the study of the impact of the OSR activities and
measures taken to ensure the project’s sustainability.
5.1 OSR Impact to the target groups
The OSR consortium is organising and categorizing with metadata a rich collection of existing
resources from science centres and museums across Europe. The collection includes
numerous web based materials, guidelines for the realization of both physical and virtual
educational field trips (connected to the school curriculum or more open), lesson plans and
relevant educational materials, professional development and training materials,
educational projects and activities for schools, families and individuals, digital images of
exhibits, videos and animations of physical phenomena and instructional descriptions and
thousands of electronic publications on topics ranging from everyday science topics to issues
concerning scientific research.
The OSR users’ community counts 970 active content contributors, including 800 science
teachers and 170 museum educators. This community is developing in the framework of
user-centered activities (training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are
organised by the consortium members in the framework of the project’s implementation.
The main aim of the project and of the approach developed in OSR is to bridge the gap
between formal and informal science learning and to contribute to the development of a
strong community of science teachers and museums educators that would be able to
collaborate more effectively. In the following paragraphs we describe the impact of the
project’s implementation at the end of the second year.
5.2 Impact to the school Communities
The OSR Educational Design facilitates the following:
• Organisation of digital resources of the museums and science centres
according to the school curriculum and to specific teaching models. Teachers
consider the connections to the curriculum as the most important parameter
for the effective use of the materials in the school practice. To learn science in
meaningful ways, students need to see connections to familiar problems
which are relevant and important in their daily lives. Learning processes in
this framework are embedded in communicative situations, where teaching
science offers good conditions for fostering communication and cooperation
in students' experimental practices. For a content orientation the planned
teaching topics should be based on a broad field of knowledge and
application. To be effective, the teaching sequences should build up in a way
that student knowledge can increase and link to, in other words be
“constructed” by them.
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• Integration of field trips to the school activities. The OSR user group has
already developed about 138 educational pathways (this number was
expected at the end of the third year of the project). This fact demonstrates
that the approach as well as the user friendliness of the tools offers to the
teachers a unique opportunity to use the digital resources in their classroom.
Additionally, situated learning fosters the ability to transfer acquired
knowledge to a variety of different situations. Situated learning is an essential
component of acquiring the ability for self-organized and self-regulated
learning. Ideally, schools should provide opportunities for the development of
a competence to learn and an ability to be an autonomous learner in the
future. This includes the development of meta-cognitive learning
competencies like e.g. elaboration strategies or learning strategies and their
application and usefulness.
• Introduction of IBSE activities in the school curriculum. The use of the IBSE
model in the design of the Structure Educational Pathway template has
offered to the OSR team the opportunity to integrate the OSR case into the
general framework of the science education reform that is taking place in
many European countries. According to IB pedagogy, teaching should be
guided by a holistic planning process that takes the students' learning
processes, the subject matter and the teaching methods into account.
Students' orientation is a very important and significant variable that
correlates positively with students' performance. It offers students the chance
to link the information presented to their prior experience and knowledge.
Students have the chance to engage in an active and self-guided learning
process. Consequently, effective learning processes should be designed with
student's prior experience and knowledge.
• Promotion of resource based learning. The project is accelerating the
adoption of digital resources, in particular with a view to improve their use
and integration in national curricula, through an approach that is based on
stimulating demand by users.
• Effective community building between teachers and teachers and museum
educators. The OSR users’ community includes 970 active content
contributors, including 800 science teachers and 170 museum educators. This
community is developing in the framework of user-centered activities
(training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are organised by the
consortium members in the framework of the project’s implementation.
Many of the educational pathways have been developed jointly by teachers
and museum educators. Many training workshops are organised for both
groups. The OSR summer and winter schools are bringing together teachers
and museum educators to work together, exchange best practices and to
reflect on each other’s approach and methods.
The statements above are supported by the validation work, the implementation of a series
of proof of concept experiments and the web analytics of the portal.
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5.3 Impact to the Museum Visitors
OSR aspires to create an innovative framework that seamlessly integrating formal and
informal education, enhancing access to the numerous science educational resources of the
science museums and centres through a more participatory and highly distributed way to
augment museums’ institutional documentation with content that reflects the perspectives
and the interests of their communities. In this way, the OSR approach:
• Facilitates Lifelong Learning: Enriching the repertoire of learning
opportunities. Museum visitors have the chance to add their contributions to
the science centres and museums’ collections and to use educational
materials that could enrich their learning opportunities. For the public as a
whole, the resources of science centers and museums are a source of
information on contemporary technological and scientific developments.
• Encouraging active user interaction with the content. The big challenge for
science museums and centres is to capture the huge market of potential web
visitors and materialize it into physical visitors and/or long-term relationships
with the science museum community. This will allow science museums and
science centres to collaborate on the large scale while achieving
unprecedented synergies.
• Participatory exhibition design. The OSR approach could support the work of
the science museum design and development team to innovate the
exhibition. The explanatory and additional materials currently accompanying
the exhibits are produced for general used and they are presented to all the
different visitors’ categories. Social tagging could enable a departure from the
authored voice of the museum and, through the distributed contribution of
many individuals, the construction of additional means to access the
exhibition and the relevant content. As the number of social tags is increasing
significantly day by day, the OSR team will have the chance to analyze the
impact of this process to the exhibition design.
5.4 Impact to the Museum Educators
The use and the implementation of tools like OSR is a challenging task for museum
educators. The introduction of formalism (e.g. curriculum issues, metadata standards) is not
always understandable from many museums educators who are used to the high degree of
freedom offered by the museum setting. The OSR team is making a large effort to
demonstrate the benefits of such an organization scheme.
• Proposing a uniform way for the organisation and presentation of the digital
content of museums. From the work-to-date it is clear that a uniform
standardization approach is needed to assist science museums and centres in
retrofitting educational resources to fit the theoretical learning object
structure, while also ensuring that, as digital libraries scale up, newly
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developed objects can be added. Such a uniform standardization process is
possible when science education digital libraries synergize to share and
critique metadata schemes to arrive at better educational metadata
standards.
• Innovative methods for assessing the impact of the exhibition design. Through
a series of proof of concept experiments, the OSR team aims to demonstrate
a new way to receive visitors’ feedback during the field trips in the museum
or in the science centre. Initial data from the social tagging process
demonstrate that this method could be effectively used to assess the impact
on visitors. For a selected sample of exhibits, very simple flash applications
were prepared including a short knowledge test. About 300 visitors have used
their mobile devices to provide feedback to the system while visiting the
exhibition. These data form a very good basis for future analysis of impact
assessment.
• Presenting Innovative methods for interacting with the visitors. Through web-
based, remote access applications, museum artefacts can be offered online to
engage diverse audiences in innovative learning experiences. Web services
have been made more widely available thanks to the mass take-up of
broadband technologies. Science centres and museums websites now
incorporate a range of media including virtual environments, 3D views, 360°
panoramic images, live webcams, animations, zoomable images, video,
interactive maps and timelines, etc. Various approaches of science content
presentation over the web are followed by the different science museums.
There are no other institutions that could take on the responsibility of
bringing democracy to technology. Completely opening up to digitalization
will probably be a difficult step for museums to take, as they will be laying
themselves open to criticism and controversy, but it will be a way for them to
be part of contemporary society. Normally science museums have very large
collections and these collections provide inspiration for further research. This
research gives insight into new knowledge that in turn inspires new
exhibitions. This is the renewal process in a museum. A new artefact implies
new research, which gives new stories to tell to the visitors. In this way,
museums have an unlimited source of new exhibitions for their visitors. What
it is needed in the world of science centers is a coordinated international
research and development programme, for innovating new science
communication tools and methods. According to Asger Høeg, President of
Ecsite (2003-2007), this research will be the mechanism for renewing the
science centers. Science Centers must be perceived as a “Gateway” for all to
access science on a more informal level.
• Allows for cross-institutional collaboration. Most of the OSR Educational
Pathways provide a connection between collections from different museums.
Cité des Sciences, the Museo de la Scienza “Leonardo da Vinci” and the
Deutsches Museum are collaborating effectively for the development of such
model pathways that could be used as reference for future developments.
The work focuses on the remote collaboration on educational pathways
merging complementary resources on a common subject.
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• Effective community building between museum educators and museum
educators and teachers. The OSR users’ community includes 970 active
content contributors, including 800 science teachers and 170 museum
educators. This community is developing in the framework of user-centered
activities (training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are
organised by the consortium members in the framework of the project’s
implementation. Many of the educational pathways have been developed
jointly by teachers and museum educators. Many training workshops are
organised for both groups. The OSR summer and winter schools are bringing
together teachers and museum educators to work together, exchange best
practices and to reflect on each other’s approach and methods.
5.5 Sustainability of the OSR approach
One key aim of the OSR project is to produce a sustainable solution for educational
resources for science learning and teaching. This is the preliminary plan after 24 months of
work on the project and it will be adjusted during the last year of the project after further
discussions among the consortium.
5.6 Sustainability of the portal
The OSR portal will be maintained by Elinogermaniki Agogi after the project ends in the
spring of 2012. The portal will be run in a similar manner as it has been during the project.
However, at this point we don’t envision any technological enhancements to the portal after
the end of the project.
5.7 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. Furthermore,
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.
5.8 Sustainability of the OSR user base
In the third year of the project, the consortium will draw a sustainable plan to enrich the
user base of the OSR portal by disseminating results with future activities and projects that
the consortium will come across. This plan will be fully introduced with the final deliverables
of the project.
The OSR Deliverable 7.4 “Roadmap - Towards a Standardized Science Resources (re-)usability
approach (final version)” will also present a sustainability plan of the OSR portal for the years
following the end of the project.
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