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Projects

Confolio

An electronic portfolio project based on SCAM and SHAME. The project is coordinated by the KMR group and is financed by the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement and the Swedish Educational Broadcasting company. A good overview article is Using SHAME to fill your SCAM by Wilbert Kraan at CETIS. A simple web interface to the Confolio system is avaliable at http://www.confolio.org

The UR digital media library

is based on SCAM, SHAME and Confolio. It is available at http://www.ur.se.

Prolearn

A European Network of Excellence for technology-enhanced professional learning within EU/FP6. See http://www.prolearn-project.org

Matriks

A Swedish network for exchange of experiences around the use of mathematical learning objects for university courses. The project runs from January to September 2006 and it is fininced by the Swedish Netuniversity and the Swedish library association BIBSAM.

Six universities are involved. and the projct is financing one teacher at each university on 20% (= one day a week) during the spring. The teachers will choose suitable learning objects from the archives (see below), use them in some of their courses and annotate these LOs with their experiences of how it worked in their personal Confolios.

The Graphing Calculator will be the main "math learning object creation tool", and the Confolio (with its semantic web-based opinion publication network) will support an exchange of teaching experiences around using these learning objects. The main resource will be Ambjörn Naeve's mathemagic archive which contains about 500 learning objects, most of which have been created with the Graphing Calculator.

The project also involves the media archive of the Swedish Educational Broadcasting company, where teachers will be allowed to browse-and-cut LOs from various math programs.

For a more detailed description (in Swedish), see the project home page, or the Matriks confolio

FLIT-mathematics

FLIT (Flexible Learning with IT enhancements) is a project, which is presently in preparation. Apart from the KMR-group, it involves the Swedish Foundation for Enterprise Education, the Swedish Educational Broadcasting company, Ericsson Education and a number of high-schools in the Stockholm and Uppsala area, that are interested in enabling teachers and students to collaborate in creating, annotating and using mathematical learning objects. More information (in Swedish) is available in the FLIT confolio.

LUISA

A STREP (Strategic Targeted Research Project) within EU/FP6.

openLMS

A Swedish project on the assessment of open-source based learning platforms (LMSes) from an interoperability perspective. The project is coordintated by Uppsala Learning Lab and financed by the Swedish Netuniversity.

Objectives: The openLMS project has performed a survey-style assessment of open source based systems for technology-enhanced learning (here collectively referred to as Learning Management Systems) from an interoperability perspective. The overall objective of the project is to facilitate the exchange of experiences of such systems in order to enable cost-effective and quality-enhancing collaborative development of such systems and promote their use within Swedish universities and university colleges. Hence the survey focuses on assessing the “potential for interoperability” of open source based LMSes from a technical perspective.

Scope: The study focuses exclusively on open source LMS projects where the software technology and the development framework used is founded on open source code, open standards, open development tools and open operating systems with no limitations on distribution and use. Consequently commercial products have been explicitly excluded from the assessment. To qualify for this evaluation, an LMS project must have shown results in the form of code, functional application(s) and documentation. Also, the project must be focused on learning management – and not just content management.

Process and method: The study has been carried out in accordance with the following process:

Find the initial technology candidates that fit the defined scope.
Identify criteria/metrics and use cases useful in evaluating open source LMSes.
Assess the selected technology candidates using software technology criteria.
Select the top third of these candidates as quality candidates for quality evaluation.
Further assess these candidates using ISO9126 software quality criteria.
Select the top third of these candidates as UC candidates for testing based on Use Cases.

Technical profile: Applying a general information systems approach to the technical aspects of LMSes have analyzed the systems in terms of the following different modules (sub-systems):

Operating system
Network system
Development system
Storage system
Application system
Web system
Portal system
Broker system
Metadata system
Security system
Peer-to-peer system

The ways that an LMS implements these different (sub) systems constitutes what we term its technical profile. For example, Figure 1 shows that Sakai uses Java as Language, Eclipse as Development environment and CVS for version handling. These technical profiles convey important information about the “interoperability potential” between different LMSes, and can be used as a starting point for a more detailed assessment of the efforts involved in actually achieving interoperability between different sub-systems. More information (mostly in Swedish) is available in the openLMS confolio.