Nordlet seminar presentation

1. Integrating LOR with teachers'
community portal and LO authoring
Mart Laanpere, Hans Põldoja

2. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California,
94105, USA.

3. LO authoring tools and
repositories from TLU
• LeMill — web community for collaborative
authoring of open educational resources
• TATS — question and test authoring system
• Krihvel — learning environment and learning
resource authoring tool for elementary schools
• Waramu — federated learning object repository
• Koolielu — national educational portal based on
elgg

4. http://lemill.net

5. What is LeMill?
• Web community for finding, authoring and sharing
open and free learning resources
• Open source server software developed in EU 6FP
project CALIBRATE
• Learning Mill

7. Learning resources
Web page Lesson plan
Presentation School project
Exercise PILOT

13. More than content
• Methods
• Tools
• Collections
• Teaching and
learning stories

18. LeMill as a social software
• Linking people by
location, skills and
interests
• Groups for
collaborative
authoring
• Group forums

21. Members
6000
5265
4708
4500
2959
3000 2796
2337
1698
1500
867
666
465 414
343 359 364 374
242 273
65 89 105 111
27
4 5 18
0
Jul 2006 Jan 2007 Jul 2007 Jan 2008 Jul 2008 Jan 2009
Estonia Total

22. Members by specified country
20%
36%
5%
5%
5%
11%
18%
Estonia Georgia Hungary Finland Czech Republic Lithuania Other

25. Other LO software
developed at TLU

26. TATS

27. Krihvel

28. Krihvel

29. Waramu

30. Educational portals in Estonia
• Since 1997, Miksike.ee: e-worksheets, online
competitions, quizzes
• Subject-specific: handicraft, literature
• Project-specific: Hello, Spring!
• Institutional: science didactics in Tartu University
• The first Teachers’ Netgate 1999
• Koolielu portal 2001: based on commercial CMS

31. New version: Koolielu 2.0
• Centre for Educational Technology in Tallinn
University won a tender organised by the Tiger Leap
Foundation
• Software: based on Elgg, LAMP platform
• Web 2.0 principles: users as content creators, tags,
RSS, dashboard, widgets, embedding, remixing,
metadata
• Connection with LOR (Waramu) and federation
• OpenID, Single Sign-On, hosted by EENet.ee

32. Structure of Koolielu 2.0
• News – aggregated from various online sources,
• Advertisements – course offerings and job search,
• Tools – links to the online or downloadable
educational applications,
• Resources – repository of learning objects,
• Discussions – traditional online forum,
• Communities – every user can initiate an ad-hoc
community which will get automatically a
dedicated collaboration space, forum and other
collaboration tools

33. Dashboard & Profile page
• Elgg components, similar to iGoogle or PageFlakes
• Dashboard is a default front page for logged-in
users, Profile is a kind of public e-portfolio
• Both are populated with Open Social widgets
• Default set of our own widgets: My Learning
Resources, My News, etc
• User-defined extras, layout and access rights

34. Content management
• Different workflows:
• News and advertisements: submitted by any
authenticated user, reviewed/published by editors
• Learning resources: submitted by anyone (as a file
or URL with LOM), reviewed/published by subject
moderators
• Forum discussions: anonymous participants
allowed (CAPTCHA for humanity check)
• Automatic archiving

35. Integrated LOR
• Waramu was developed also in CET
• Java application, MySQL database
• No user interface, is used not by humans but by
other applications via SOAP Web services
• LRE metadata application profile (EUN)
• Connected with FIRE federation, LRE can harvest
metadata from Waramu:
http://lreforschools.eun.org

36. Curriculum mapping
• Every Learning Object in Koolielu/Waramu is
mapped to relevant curriculum topics (category-
field in the metadata)
• EUN’s Multilingual Thesaurus was too broad, we
developed a new taxonomy based on Estonian
national curriculum
• Is used for browsing and searching Learning
Objects, also for analysing curriculum coverage
with LOs

37. Web 2.0 type sharing
• Tags, tag clouds
• Categories: subjects, curriculum topics
• RSS feeds
• Bookmarks: Elgg’s standard feature
• Recommendations of Learning Objects by subject
moderators

38. Community building
• Friends: like in FaceBook, only asymmetrical
• Friend collections: a set of friends
• Communities: traditional Elgg groups (sharing
forum, pages, files) and integration of outside
communities

39. Future plans
• Agile software development, weekly consultations
with the client (Tiger Leap Foundation) and
participatory design sessions with teachers have
changed the initial concept and schedule
• Is developed as open source software, can be re-
used in other countries (if TLF agrees)
• Future developments: teacher’s e-portfolio,
competency management etc.
• Up & running since December 2009:
http://www.koolielu.ee
Development: http://trac.htk.tlu.ee/koolielu2

40. References
• Schaffert, S., Geser, G. (2008, February 29). Open Educational Resources and
Practices. eLearning Papers, 7. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://
www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media14907.pdf

41. Thank You!
• mart.laanpere@tlu.ee, hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
• http://www.slideshare.net/martlaa