Title of Initiative / Project
Open discovery space: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of eLearning resources
Name of Organiser
INTRASOFT International S.A.
Start and ending date of the Initiative
2012-2015
Was the initiative carried out in the framework of a funded project?
Yes
Funding Programme
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme
Title of the project
Open Discovery Space: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of eLearning resources
Promoter
INTRASOFT International S.A.
Project number
CIP-ICT-PSP-2011-5, Theme 2: Digital Content, Objective 2.4: eLearning Objective 2.4
Type of deliverables
Online course, Teaching Methodology, Didactical resource
Thematic area
Chemistry, Maths, Physics, Biology, ICT, Science
Language of the deliverable
English, Other non EU
Description of the initiative
ODS addresses various challenges that face the eLearning environment in the European context. The interface has been designed with students, teachers, parents and policy makers in mind. ODS will fulfill three principal objectives. Firstly, it will empower stakeholders through a single, integrated access point for eLearning resources from dispersed educational repositories. Secondly, it engages stakeholders in the production of meaningful educational activities by using a social-network style multilingual portal, offering eLearning resources as well as services for the production of educational activities. Thirdly, it will assess the impact of the new educational activities, which could serve as a prototype to be adopted by stakeholders in school education.
The Open Discovery Space project is bringing innovation to three key areas:
1. Proposing innovative ways to encourage educational communities to use eLearning resources and exchange their experience and views on ease of use and quality of those resources.
2. Proposing an innovative educational design and an educational metadata organisation scheme. These measures will seek to exploit the elements of the learning context in eLearning resources (i.e., educational objectives, pedagogical models, learners’ personal characteristics and needs, etc), as well as the teachers’ competence profiles (knowledge, skills and attitudes) making it possible to measure and assess the impact of eLearning resources ON schools both in terms of learning outcomes and learning activities.
3. Proposing innovative solutions that could remove linguistic and cultural barriers, improving the ease of use in existing repositories in order to deliver relevant Learning Resources to teachers, students and parents more effectively.
More Information
The project addresses various challenges that face the eLearning environment in the European context. Its websites offers free access to deliverables:
http://opendiscoveryspace.eu/download/public-deliverables
Deliverables inlcude: educational design, training framework, methodology for educational content alignment and integration and others. The website of the project offers also access to number of repositories with resources for e-learning in the filed of science education:
http://opendiscoveryspace.eu/repositories
Teachers’ Opinion
The initiative offers access to a lot of materials. For a teacher in science it would be beneficial to use them in his practice for sure. However the repository of resources is not organized in any way and it is difficult to search the resources in any criteria. One has to visit each repository in order to look through it and find what might be relevant, which is a time requiring process.
Students’ Opinion
The good thing of this project is that there are e-learning resources in Bulgarian. It is much easier to study science in your mother language instead of trying to understand the difficult terms in English or another language.
Comments on this Relevant initiatives
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Date: 2015.04.06
Posted by Todor Damyanov (Bulgaria)
It's nice to have conferences to discuss and offer ideas.
Students must be informed of all conferences and initiatives with academic orientation. Yet the information does not reach all students.
Date: 2015.04.02
Posted by Alex Yanudov (Bulgaria)
Yes, I think that the site provides information that is useful to students and would motivate them to learn subjects in school.The information is accessible and easy to comprehend.We as teenagers we stayed in front of the computers often it is a way to learn something new to prepare for any tests during the school year.
