Nordlet: The Nordic-Baltic Open Community for Learning, Education, and Training - NORDPLUS Proposal

Summary: Purpose

The main goal of the NORDLET project is to build a Nordic-Baltic network and Community of Practice set to develop and harness a region-specific perspective on the use of technology in Learning, Education and Training. The common ground for the NORDLET Open Educational Community is to provide a single cross-sector, cross-country access point to educational resources within a dynamic network. Our focus is to promote sharing, re-use and enhancement of learning scenarios and learning resources across all levels of the educational systems of the Nordplus countries.

The NORDLET community will follow the Nordic tradition of creating open dynamic educational opportunities for all - providing networking and technology tools to enhance cooperation and communication across countries and sector boundaries to improve the exchange of educational materials, pedagogical and technological expertise.

Summary: Project

The project will build a strong community of Open Education. It will enhance mobility across the participating countries and improve cooperation across sectors. It will contribute towards a culture of sharing and cooperation in schools, Higher and adult education. The main instruments are

• The Nordic-Baltic conference to establish, strengthen and extend Nordic-Baltic cooperation. The annual conference will be the first conference on open education and open educational resources for all particpating Nordic and Baltic countries.
• Regional events to ease access to the network for all countries and to strengthen cooperation
• a single access point for educational materials for schools, adult and higher education (web-based repository)
  

The NORDLET project brings together a strong consortium representing all Nordic and Baltic countries in a joint effort to define a Nordic Baltic perspective on the use of technology in Learning, Education and Training, taking part in an Open Educational Community to foster sharing, re-use and enhancement of learning resources across all levels of the educational systems.

 

Project purpose in detail

The Nordic and Baltic countries share pedagogic values developed over a long period of time, and lately, a practice of educational use of learning technologies that should be supported by a sustained community of practice. As the domain of technology enhanced learning is indeed global, the NORDLET initiative aims at contributing to an international development of learning technologies and pedagogical practices. To do so, we have to explore and consolidate our own knowledge base through cross-sectoral and cross-country cooperation to be able to contribute to a European and international development.

The NORDLET Open Educational Community will provide an open space for stakeholders in learning, education, and training throughout the Baltic and Nordic countries to share, enhance, re-use, and improve educational resources (in the broad sense of this concept). We firmly believe in cooperation across national, cultural, institutional and sectoral borders, as well as across languages barriers. However, we advocate a pragmatic (and realistic) view on how cooperation on Learning, Education and Training will take place. The first stepping stone for educators will be their own subject domain, language, culture or other interests. The next step will be one "water ring" further out, exploring the Nordic and Baltic resources. The NORDLET project will make it worth while to take the next step. The partners of the NORDLET initiative are further involved in different European networks, aiming at creating a European-wide exchange of learning resources. Seen from a European perspective the NORDLET project will be a point of contact to the Nordic and Baltic countries. From the Nordic Baltic perspective the NORDLET project will be a mechanism to ensure that our common pedagogical and cultural values are accommodated when attaching to these broader networks.

Current situation

A variety of influence factors determines the success of establishing of cooperative and sharing education: from cultural differences to technology acceptance. However, the situation in the Nordic and Baltic countries is very promising - what is missing is a single access point to connect and relate current strategies and activities. Three main trends can be identified as the main drivers for our intiative:

1. Availability of resources

Across our target region, the Nordic and Baltic countries, a variety of learning resources have been developed. A resource can be any kind of material which is used for learning purposes: learning objects, learning scenarios, lesson plans, animations and simulations, networks of people etc. Many of those resources have been developed with huge efforts but there usage is restricted to one organization or sector. Most of the resources are not shared. As an example Westrienen & Lynch (2005) have identified 25 institutional repositories in Swedish Higher Education and 7 in Norway with an average of about 500 documents. Even more resources are available for the school sector. In this sector, most initiatives are European, such as the repository by European Schoolnet (http://lre.eun.org) in which about 40000 learning resources are available. However, the usage rate of the enormous amount of learning resources is extremely low. There is basically no re-use across institutions and even less cooperation and knowledge sharing across sectors. This means that even in networks like Nordplus, cooperation and resource exchange is limited and, thus, should be improved.

2. Potentials in the Nordic / Baltic region

The Nordic countries have a strong tradition in participatory design and in collaborative learning practices. This is quite a different tradition from the (American) instructional design tradition, which has influenced much of the development of learning technologies up till now. The Baltic countries have on their side an agility and innovation force that have given these countries a leading role in use of learning technologies. Both parts of our region have great potential to establish a culture of open education: sharing, re-using and enhancing learning resources across countries and sectors.

However, the domain of technology enhanced learning is still immature. The "learning object repository" era dominated by technologies emanating from the training sector and American Department of Defense (Sharable Content Object Reference Model, SCORM) is now in its decline, and the recent fuzz about "web 2.0" technologies signals development of new technologies and practices based on pedagogical frameworks that are more adapted to life long learning and education. The Nordic educational model and the Nordic Baltic educational community would have a lot to contribute to pave the ground for a pedagogically more sound design practice. However, this window of opportunity will not be open indefinitely, and without strategic endeavor and joint work we could see ourselves side-tracked for another time.

3. Networking

Even though the Nordic and Baltic countries are very strong in the field of technology enhanced learning, there is no strong network within the region. Most of the networks are limited to one sector or to institutional partnerships.

When creating an open educational community, it is necessary to build larger and more inter-related networks to reach a critical mass of users. In particular, there is no established Nordic or Nordic/Baltic forum or conference for exchange of best practice within technology enhanced learning among the Nordplus countries. For the last years, European projects have been in focus for the Nordic and Baltic e-learning community. They still are; however, we now see that the Nordic countries could benefit hugely by a closer cooperation between themselves to utilise scarce resources and expertise.

The second focus is cross-sector cooperation. There are very few approaches how learning resources can be shared and re-used across sectors. One reason is the perceived distance between those sectors. Schools perceive university materials as "too advanced, academic institutions perceive adult education materials as "too simple" or "too commercial". However, there are successful approaches how cooperations across sectors can work: as an example, in the European COSMOS project (in which the University of Jyväskylä runs cross-sector workshops), a network of schools, universities and further education share physics and astronomy materials across sector boundaries (http://www.ea.gr/ep/cosmos). From our experience, it is possible to identify and utilize synergies within trusted networks.

Through exploiting the common Nordic and Baltic expertise and resources the NORDLET project could make a modest contribution to an international development of more adapt learning technologies.

Success factors

A variety of studies have been done to identify success and failure factors for establishing a culture of knowledge sharing and re-use of knowledge and learning resources. The most important factors are:

• Lack of access: Stakeholders do not know how and where to search and get educational resources. It is therefore necessary to provide an easy-to-use single access point.
• Fear of abuse: Users are afraid that content they submit to repositories are abused (e.g. for commercial purposes) or used in wrong or un-intended contexts. It is therefore necessary to provide mechanisms to overcome this fear (such as clear legal guidelines and explanations)
• Lack of organizational support: Organizations might not value re-use and do not support knowledge sharing. It is therefore useful to create such a network which is well known to organizations.
• Not-invented-here syndrome: People prefer to have their own materials which they have developed and which they can "control". This syndrome becomes weaker in trusted networks as people tend to be willing to re-use materials of close and trustworthy colleagues. Therefore it is necessary to build and facilitate trusted groups of people (such as special interest groups in certain domains or geographical regions) within the network.
• Number of users / networks: The approach of knowledge sharing and re-use only works in large networks. Once users do not find appropriate materials or fellow colleagues, they will not use a repository / portal / community any longer. Nordplus is a promising basis to create a network which is large enough to find contacts and resources for many fields.
  

Regarding the priorities of he Horizontal program, we address the following two priority areas:

1. Cross-sectoral cooperation within the areas and themes given priority in the 3 sectoral sub-programs: Our main topic is to provide an open educational community across sectors. This means that we provide the technology infrastructure to share, re-use and enhance learning resources of all kinds. This approach provides potentials of cooperation for all three sub-programs. Results developed in the sub-programs can be shared with other users in the community. By doing so, we reach a higher degree of distribution of results. Moreover, we promote the cooperation between the sectors: As an example, a variety of resources and materials can be used across sectors (e.g., Higher Education materials to Adult Education). By providing a common space for sharing those, we will improve the cross-sector cooperation. However, providing a web infrastructure for this task does not meet our requirements - to reach a culture of knowledge sharing, it is necessary to provide networking instruments. In our approach, we will organize 1) cross-sector conferences across the Nordic countries and 2) provide tools for networking on the Web.
2. Cross-sectoral cooperation for quality and innovation in the educational systems in a perspective of life long learning: The approach of open content or open educational resources can lead to a new way of developing learning, education, and training. In traditional scenarios, institutions and their people develop learning materials or lesson plans only for themselves or for their organization - in our approach, we aim at the cooperative usage, improvement and enhancement of learning materials and scenarios. This approach can lead to new cooperative contents and didactic approaches.

As a conclusion, our project makes the goals of the Nordplus program operational - we will contribute towards cooperation and open education - overcoming barriers towards a sharing culture!

Project description in detail

NORDLET contributes to Nordic Baltic cooperation in technology enhanced learning, working towards a sharing culture of educational resources and people. We aim at utilizing the strong Nordic and Baltic educational tradition of open education leading to cooperation, access and innovation.

The NORDLET project builds on the results of the BOLDIC project (The Baltic-Nordic Network for Exchange of Experience in ODL, 2002 -2004), that developed a specification of agreed pedagogical ideas as background for communication, collaboration and development in Open and Distance Learning. The NORDLET project will enhance and extend these results to the school, university and training sectors.

The NORDLET Open Educational Community will provide an open space for stakeholders in learning, education, and training throughout the Nordic and Baltic countries to share, enhance, re-use, and improve educational resources, learning scenarios and best practices across our countries and across sectors.

Open Education in our understanding means that

1. trusted networks establish a culture of knowledge sharing,
2. people have access to educational materials and scenarios from Nordic and Baltic countries, and
3. people and organizations cooperate and work on innovations and improvements of materials and scenarios.

Different stakeholders make materials available to their own institution. However, even though some of these activities have been very successful, re-use and cooperative development of learning materials, offering common courses or cooperatively developing innovations in technology-enhanced learning have not yet reached a broad target audience. It is still limited to existing networks which do not reach a large-scale distribution.

In the last decade, a variety of resources have been developed across Europe. Some of those initiatives provide repositories to share and access educational materials (e.g., courses, lesson plans, experiences) - specifically in the Nordplus countries, a vast amount of resources have been developed (for example in the Baltic Virtual Campus). Additionally, Nordplus and other initiatives have created networks of universities, educational institutions and schools.

Our Open Educational Community will create new opportunities for stakeholders. The following objectives describe our project in detail:

• Develop mechanisms for cooperation and sharing across borders: Using resources across borders means that people have to overcome several barriers. Language is one of them, but also cultural barriers apply. We will provide a series of conferences, workshops and other mechanisms, e.g. electronic cooperation tools, to overcome those barriers and to establish sustainable cross-border cooperation.

• Overcome barriers and fears towards a culture of sharing and re-use: To reach a culture of sharing knowledge and resources, it is necessary to build networks, to establish trust between people and to reduce fears ("not invented here syndrome", legal issues, reputation, etc.). Therefore, we propose different instruments to establish a culture of cooperation, sharing, and trust.

• Provide tools to search, re-use, improve, and share resources of all kinds: To efficiently utilise available resources, it is necessary to provide easy-to-use tools so that people with all levels of ICT expertise can access, use, and adapt materials and scenarios.

• Collect and provide access to educational resources across the Nordic and Baltic countries: There are many initiatives developing educational materials and pedagogical innovations in schools, adult education, and higher education. However, those are not necessarily accessible for stakeholders across the Nordic countries. Therefore, we will explore the possibilities to provide a single access point to those materials and scenarios to ease the access to this community.

As a conclusion, a balanced set of networking and access instruments will be developed, both electronically and face-to-face. Those will be continuously evaluated and improved to achieve our main goal: open education and a culture of sharing across sectors in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

The NORDLET consortium represents all sectors that the Nordplus program addresses and all the Nordic and Baltic countries. The NORDLET idea was conceived by Nordic learning technology standards experts who recognized the need to mobilize the Nordic tradition in pedagogy and participatory design in their community of practice. It was soon realized that the need for defining and harnessing a Nordic tradition in this domain strikes a cord in all the Nordplus countries, and consequently this initiative will spark a broad and expanding network allowing time and a minimum of leadership and due methodology and support mechanism.

Therefore, the consortium as it maps out in this proposal today is just an indication of the potential. However, the current NORDLET network as summarized below, shows that we have been able to embrace all countries and sectors even before we have achieved some base funding allowing us to work systematically to build our network.

• The Icelandic node is Keilir - the Atlantic Centre of Excellence - a new an dynamic organization turning the former military base of Kaflavik Airport into a vehicle for learning, education and training for the Icelandic society.
• The Norwegian node is Oslo University College assisted by a small SME, Hypatia A/S. OUC offers the broadest portfolio of professional studies in Norway and the unit eStandard has contributed substantially to uptake of learning technologies in Norway. Hypatia is working on development of learning technologies, contributing to international standardization, especially in the field of accessibility.
• The Swedish node is run by the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement aand Umeå University. The National Agency is also the main driver for the school sector within our project. Additionally, UMU has courses and study programs in every academic field, and has provided a strong leadership in technology enhanced learning in cooperation with the National Agency.
• The Danish node is University of Aarhus, which through the Centre for IT & Learning has participated in Nordic Baltic projects before. Through research, network activities and teaching the Centre for IT & Learning aims at constructing new knowledge on digital media in support of learning. The centre has participated in research projects within primary, secondary and higher education, and is currently involved in a project that investigates problems that arise when students pass from one level to the next in the Danish educational system (from primary to secondary education and from secondary education to higher education).
• The Finnish node is University of Jyväskylä, a multi-disciplinary university with a strong commitment to develop human-oriented approaches to future technologies. The University has initiated many adult education programs and been active in building networks in this field in Finland.
• The Estonian node is Tallinn University with a strong Institute of Information Studies that have contributed to a number of Nordic Baltic projects within Learning, Education and Training.
• The Latvian node is Riga Technical University, the main technical educational institution in Latvia, which actively liaising with the national Distance Education Centre of the country.
• The Lithuanian node is Vytautas Magnus university, a Artes Liberales University with more than 70 study programs and a dedicated Distance Education Centre. The Centre will involve the secondary education schools in the NORDLET activities, the National Association of Adult Education as well as ODL associations in the Nordic Baltic countries.

In conclusion, the consortium has the ability to mobilize 1) all countries of the Nordic and Baltic region and 2) all sectors of the NORDPLUS target group.

Project activities

The project will be broken down into the main activities towards this goal, comprising three highly related areas that will influence our project:

Action Line 1: Establishing the NORDLET Network

The main success factor of our project is to involve a critical mass of users. Starting from the barriers to Open Education, we need to address three levels

• Strategic cooperation: To develop a culture of open education, it is necessary to have a common vision and objectives. We will develop the NORDLET Open Education Agenda within the project duration. This agenda shall reflect the views and perspectives of all three sectors of NORDPLUS, the perpective of organizations involved (schools, agencies, universities, community organizations, etc.). The agenda will be continuously improved by electronic and face to face discourse and discussion. New versions will be developed for each NORDLET annual event.
• Cross-sector and cross-country cooperation: To improve the cooperation across borders and sectors, we will provide good practices. They will provide examples of cross-country cooperation and will show how organizations have cooperated using shared resources (e.g. curriculum inter-relations, cooperatively developed learning materials, etc.).
• Individual barriers: Individual involvement, engagement and acceptance is the key to our success. If people do not accept the idea of open education, they will not participate. Therefore, we provide awareness workshops and hands-on events throughout the project duration. We will organize both, regional and NORDLET events (covering all countries involved). By these instruments, we provide opportunities for all types of stakeholders.
  
  

In terms of services, we develop the following networking opportunities:

Action item 1.1 Annual NORDLET Conference: This is the main event to start cooperations and new opportunities for stakeholders from all Nordic and Baltic countries. As described above, this conference will be the only Nordic-Baltic conference in technology enhanced learning covering all sectors. It will not be a presentation only conference, but an interactive meeting place for stakeholders. We use the concept of "dugnad" or "talkoot" to initiate working groups involved before, during and after the conference. It will be a 2 day event with co-located events (like project kick-offs, meetings of other initiatives, trainings).

The conference will be a new meeting spot for individuals and organizations across sectors. It will specifically bring together the needs and requirements of the countries. One of the main issues will be to develop a common view of a Baltic-Nordic open educational community as the needs and situations are still very heterogeneous.

Action item 1.2. Regional NORDLET Events: Our second focus is to involve stakeholders who hesitate to join international events or conferences. Each partner in the consortium will organise at least 2 regional events per year in their country focusing on cross-sector cooperation. It will be organized as a one day workshop with possible extensions.

The regional events will focus on issues which are country specific to establish networks within the country. The following example shows a specific issue which will be discussed in the corresponding countries: In Finland, we will focus in year 1 on cross-sector cooperation between schools, adult education and Higher Education. This will be organized by the University of Jyväskylä. The focus topic will be how learning scenarios can be re-used between institutions in both sectors, in particular in ICT and management competencies. Based on the outcomes, we will determine the next topics - however, the topics correspond directly to the focus issues of the Annual Nordlet Events.

Action line 2. Providing Nordlet Finder -easier access to resources and people

Action item 2.1: Improving the access to Nordic educational resources and people

All the Nordplus countries are now exploring different means to publish and distribute educational resources and find colleagues for collaboration, e.g. through institutional repositories, national educational school portals, and social networking technologies. It seems that the university sector is more reluctant to develop joint and open initiatives compared to other sectors, even if international initiatives have attracted a lot of attention, e.g. the MIT Open Courseware and Open University UK Open Content Initiative. Nevertheless, a number of universities and Ministries of Education are contributing to European repositories of learning resources.

However, there is no single access point to Nordic and Baltic resources and no Nordic initiative to utilize the potentials. The NORDLET project will explore the possibilities to remedy this problem. The NORDLET Finder will be a web-based service with a variety of tools and social networking opportunities. The project will not develop a new solution but use the existing technology of National Repository for Learning Resources.To foster the development of nordic learning resources and content we have established a relationship with the Norwegian initiative NDLA  (Nasjonal Digital Læringsarena - http://www.ndla.no). This is a Norwegian government sponsored repository for production of learning resources covering all diciplines for the upper secondery schools. This portal has already been successfully established and will be adapted for our new target groups to minimize development efforts. It already contains a variety of resources for schools and other educational fields.

We address this challenge by creating and developing the single access point to Nordic and Baltic open educational resources in the following steps:

The access point will be developed based on existing software. This means that we do not develop "just another portal" but base our solution on an existing repository and integrate tools. Those tools are:

• Search for educational resources / infrastructure setup: It will be possible to search for educational resources across Nordic repositories. This function also includes access to the major global repositories, such as the GLOBE initiative and their partner repositories

• Legal support: All resources shall use a license for open education based on the Creative Commons Licensing scheme (http://creativecommons.org/). This part of the NORDLET Finder will provide cases to support users to understand and apply the different licensing schemes.

• Social Networking and tools: The NORDLET Finder will provide opportunities to work, teach and learn cooperatively. We use social software tools to facilitate this process. Tools include Wiki spaces by topics (e.g. the school physics wiki), Blogs for experience sharing, people networks (organized geographically and by interest / topic). Those tools are mainly used to continue networking activities established during our networking and mobility events (see below)
  

Action item 2.2. Content collection and preparation

The success of the NORDLET Finder mainly depends on a critical mass of users and available resources. All partners in our consortium will provide contents within their country and sector. This does not mean that content is developed. It means that content is linked and included and therefore accessible by the NORDLET Finder. It will be organized by:

• Sector: specific materials are just shared within sectors. However, we will interrelate materials to be shared across their intended target group.

• Geography: Resources are organized by the location of their origin as in many cases people want to cooperate face to face.

• Topic / domain: Resources are sometimes very domain specific, therefore this will be the base for searching resources and people.

• NORDPLUS: One particular focus will be to include all resources, materials and people from within the NORDPLUS program. The focus is on new and running projects, however, we will integrate successful results of previous initiatives as well.
  

Action item 2.3. Dynamic content enhancement and development

Based on the infrastructure and the resources, people will work together and develop new materials. We will facilitate the process and support stakeholders to cooperatively develop and improve existing contents. Good practice cases will be made available to the whole community.

All networking activities (see below) will result in newly developed and enhanced resources. All those materials will be developed to enhance the resource base and increase the number of people working in our initiative.

 

Action Line 3: Project Management

Our management is based on a cooperative management structure within our consortium. The University of Jyväskylä will coordinate the project, however, all decisions are made in the Exective Board, consisting of one member of all consortium members. The Executive Board will meet every 6 months face to face and monthly by phone conference.

The project management action line includes corresponding activities: Reporting, evaluation and dissemination (see below).

Summary

As a conclusion, our two main action lines provide concrete, hands-on support to establish an open educational community. The activities support all stakeholders and sectors of the NORDPLUS program and contribute towards a cooperation and crossing boundaries. We will actively provide support mechanisms to

• Work towards adapting an open repository as the Nordic access point to educational resources

• Utilizing social software tools to collaborate and cooperate in the open educational community

• Organizing networking events, both, for all Nordic countries and on the regional / local level

• Facilitating cross-border cooperation, re-use and trust

• Providing hands-on trainings across the Nordic countries.

In particular, we promote new innovative approaches towards teaching and learning. Open Educational Resources are a new paradigm which can change the nature of learning, education and training. The innovative solutions will come from the participants of the NORDPLUS program and our networks - we aim at providing the most efficient and reliable support mechanisms for all stakeholders, both in face to face and electronic networks. This project will contribute towards the next generation of Nordic cooperation in education, focusing on a joint initiative to improve technology enhanced learning.

Expected outcome

The action lines specified above will result in four main outcomes. Those outcomes represent clear tangible and measurable results:

1. Providing a single access point to Nordic and Baltic Open Education

• We will provide an infrastructure (NORDLET Finder Portal) for stakeholders within and outside the NORDPLUS program

• We provide tools (search, re-author, enhance, re-publish) for stakeholders.

• We provide templates for legal handling of Open Education (Creative Commons Licensing Schemes and good practice Cases)

• We develop support mechanisms for users based on good practice (good practive cases in the NORDLET Finder)

2. Providing a cross-sector and cross-border network for Open Education

• Annual NORDLET conference will be an interactive space to work on open educational solutions in a cooperative way. We will initiate workgroups to initiate new forms of cooperation across sectors and across countries.

• At least three regional events per year will contribute to involve more stakeholders and attract a wider audience

• Continuous facilitation of cooperation: We will provide support and facilitation in the portal to have a continuous discussion, cooperation and discourse-

• The Open Education Agenda will be a strategy for the participating countries to define the role of Open Education in the future.

3. Promoting innovation and quality through Open Education

• We will enable new educational experiences by re-use and knowledge sharing as a new paradigm for development of teaching and training solutions

• We will document good practices of participants of the NORDLET network.

• We will run innovation workshops during the NORDLET Annual Event

4. Develop sustainable trusted partnerships

• The main outcome of the project are trusted, long-term partnerships between stakeholder within and outside the NORDPLUS program.

• Our focus will be to establish partnerships across countries and across sectors

• All partnerships will be documented as good practice for the community

 

Dissemination

The major dissemination activity will be the publication made available of all papers presented at the Nordlet yearly conference. These papers will be made available as a booklet and on the Nordlet web-site.
The goal of the dissemination activity is to make sure that we reach our targeted audience - people using technology in an educational context, and that this group of people have access to the projects findings and a possibility to participate in our network.

Extracts and findings from the nordlet.org conference will be used as input to new international standardization activities and used to identify new needs for standardization of learning technology. One of the goals of the standardization activities is to address potential problems identified by participants in our conferences so that the use of technology in the future will be less troublesome, and to support and facilitate the use of ICT in education.

Partners in Nordlet will also be encouraged to participate in other international conferences, presenting findings from our regional nordlet.org conference. International conferences could be:

• Edmedia
• ICALT
• EDEN Annual Conference
• Online Educa
• EUNIS
  

The dissemination will consist of several specific activities:

The project itself promotes dissemination and cooperation between projects in the other programs. It is therefore mainly a dissemination activity. However, several activities as part of the core project tasks contribute towards dissemination: 

Activity 1: Marketing of the yearly conference.
As part of this activity we will send out emails to our contact network, we will use the nordlet.org web site for announcements, and we will try to have the project marketed in national educational magazines.

Activity 2: Publication of papers presented at the nordlet.org conference
All papers and posters presented at the nordlet.org conference will be published on the web. All papers will also be published as a booklet to be received by all participants.

Activity 3: National meetings and workshops
One important outreach activity will be the national conference/meeting where professionals from one country could meet and discuss the use of technology in education. Presentations given within these regional activities will be published on the nordlet.org site.

Activity 4: Project report
Each year, a project report will be written on the findings and activities accomplished. The status of regional seminars and conferences and the nordlet.org conference

 

Project management

The major task of the project management is to coordinate the consortium and to arrange the NORDLET conference each year. Additonally, it covers support for national and regional meetings as well as dissemination activities such as conferences.

The project coordination is run by the University of Jyväskylä - however, all project decisions are done in consensus. The project board consists of one participant of each institution. Additionally, we will set up an Advisory Board consisting of representatives of the sectors addressed.

The following activities will be a part of the responsibilities of the project management:

• Setting up consortium and stakeholder meetings
• Reporting and controlling
• Advisory Board meeting (annually)
• Nordlet conference support (e.g., organizing different tracks and chairs of each track)
• Manage document distribution
• Keep web-site updated
• Support dissemination activities
• Support for national conferences and meetings
• Web update

By this lean organization, we will be able to include all participants and stakeholders in decision making as well as participation. Controlling and reporting

Reporting and evaluation

The objective is to provide a comprehensive formative and summative evaluation of how a large-scale network improves development, discovery, access and use of open educational resources. It can be divided into two main tasks: to evaluate the effectiveness of the NORDLET approach (from both, a process- and product-oriented perspective) and to report the outcomes of our initiative.

The evaluation aims at evaluating the stakeholders' acceptance and the suitability and usefulness of NORDLET Finder, NORDLET events and the corresponding tools from a stakeholder's perspective. The evaluations will not be limited to internal interpretations and advice. We will develop guidelines and reports as part of the evaluation process.

We will focus on clear metrics and indicators to measure the performance and success of the NORDLET approach.

Evaluation of project outcomes:

The evaluation process is divided into different stages that take different aspects of the project into account. We use the classification of evaluation activities into the evaluation of context (e.g., constraints, framework), input (e.g., requirements, stakeholders), product (e.g., content, tools) and processes (e.g., project life-cycle).

Success factors: An implementation strategy for the success and performance indicators will be further elaborated within the first month of the project. For all action lines, we have developed a set of performance indicators:

Repository and infrastructure:

• Number of Contents

• Number of registered users

• Re-use rate

• Repository rating by users

Networking

• Number of users in the community

• Number of wiki articles / electronic message

• Number of feedback messages

• Participant in regional event

• Conference participants

• Conference rating by participants
  
  

Design of an evaluation plan and usability testing: Based on the needs of the stakeholders, NORDLET will determine instruments and define test procedures to measure the prescribed performance and success indicators (see above). The evaluation plan will specify evaluations of pilots and prototypes (of the NORDLET Finder) considering the efficiency, effectiveness, and the usability of single components and their foreseen effects.

Continuous Evaluation / Stakeholder Feedback: The continuous evaluation consists of two inter-related parts:

(a) Regular monitoring of the project's performance and success indicators. The project's progress and achievement against the project's objectives and the targets set above will be monitored at regular intervals to provide continuous improvement and to ensure that, in the case of underperformance, remedial actions will be taken.

(b) Evaluation trials throughout the content lifecycle as the main instrument to gather stakeholder feedback. In the beginning, experimental design and evaluation pilots with teachers, content providers and learners in small pilot groups. This will help to incrementally improve the quality of the content repositories and provide measurable indices to determine the success from the stakeholders' perspectives. Experiments targeting stakeholder groups will be designed to make the evaluation process specifically relevant to their needs (during regional / NORDLET events). Sample groups of participants will be assigned to test usability in real-life conditions. From the learner's perspective, we will focus on usability and acceptance factors of tools, matching of learning models to employed technologies, processes, and business models, measured by user satisfaction, user behavior and usage statistics. From the providers' perspective, we will focus on usability aspects, taking into account that the NORDLET Finder needs to be easily and instantly usable, and the corresponding processes will be integrated into the providers' regular processes.

 

Project activities in details / project plan

The workpackages are organized along the action lines in the project description. In this section, we specify the activities as part of the action lines and the corresponding budget / schedule.

Workpackage 1: Establishing the NORDLET Network

Duration (Start Month, End Month): 1-36

Description: The main objective of workpackage 1 is to establish a network for Nordic and Baltic knowledge sharing, exchange and collaboration within the field of learning technologies. The workpackage aims at establishing a network, which will discuss and develop a Nordic and Baltic approach to learning technologies and will promote sharing of learning resources. An important aim of the network is also to strengthen the Nordic and Baltic approach to learning technologies on an international scene.

*Activity 1.1 Annual NORDLET Event *

Activity 1.1.1. Annual NORDLET EVENT 2009 - Awareness Building on Open Education

 Description: The main goal of this event is to create awareness and exchange ideas on a Nordic-Baltic Open Education Community. It will gather experiences and requirements from our stakeholder groups (schools, adult and higher education) and develop a strategy. One focus issue is to extract the particular commonalities and specific characteristics of the Nordic and Baltic participants (e.g., pedagogic values and approaches, existing concepts and approaches. We address not solely the scientific community but moreover practitioners and users from all stakeholder groups be using different workgroup formats ("dugnad", "talkoot"-concept)

Activity 1.1.2. Annual NORDLET EVENT 2010 - Practize and Adoption of Open Education

 Description: The main goal of this event is to exchange experiences and to provide trainings on re-use across the Baltic and Nordic Community. This will lead to a community of practice across the borders of sectors - we will discuss issues when transferring learning resources between sectors and how to deal with curriculum as well as technical issues. This will start the realization and adoption of open educational resources on a broad scale.

Activity 1.1.3. Annual NORDLET EVENT 2011

 Description: The main goal of this event is to build future perspectives on re-use, interoperability and open education. We will gather experiences from projects, organizations and individuals to build a common future perspective on open education. The outcome will be a common roadmap for the participating countries and organizations but also concrete projects to further develop the ideas and developments.

*Activity 1.2 Regional NORDLET Events *

The main goal is to create awareness in all sectors and all participating countries - the events will be organized in cooperation with local partners. Each partner will organize two regional events per year.

The topics of the regional events will be developed during the project, especially during the annual NORDLET event to include the requirements of all stakeholder groups and to include recent developments.

Generally, each event will have a focus on the cooperation across sectors using a specific topic (e.g., open ICT education), depending on the needs and requirements of the local / regional communities.

Activity 1.2.1 Regional Events Finland

Activity 1.2.2 Regional Events Sweden

Activity 1.2.3 Regional Events Norway

Activity 1.2.4 Regional Events Denmark

Activity 1.2.5 Regional Events Iceland

Activity 1.2.6 Regional Events Estonia

Activity 1.2.7 Regional Events Latvia

Activity 1.2.8 Regional Events Lithuania

 

Workpackage 2: Nordlet Finder

Duration (Start Month, End Month): 1-18

Description: In this work package, we will develop the single entry point to Nordic educational resources. We will not develop a new repository but focus on the access, connections and relations to existing successful repositories and databases. This will significantly improve the ease of use and access for all stakeholders.

The objective is to develop and online community, which first and foremost focuses on social interaction, communication, discussion and dialogue. The social aspects of the community are believed to be a necessary precondition, which will form the basis for exchange of resources and collaboration across borders. Further, development of the community will be based on a user-centered approach, which means that users should be able to influence and continuously develop the design and content of the community. For instance, users should be able to develop "sub-communities" with specific interests for discussion and exchange of experiences, ideas and resources.

Activity 2.1 Content collection

The main goal of this activity is to identify and collect open educational resources. Those are available but distributed in different locations, repositories and local databases - we will collect those contents to provide an initial basis for the re-use of those resources for all three sectors.  

Activity 2.2 Legal support

The main goal is to provide guidance regarding legal issues. The biggest barrier regarding re-use is that people are afraid that their contents or scenarios are abused or not used in the intended appropriate way - however, Creative Commons provide simple and easy to understand solutions to work against this barrier.  

Activity 2.3 Infrastructure setup

In this phase, we will set up the repository infrastructure for the stakeholders and the corresponding contents and scenarios. This activity does not mean that new software is developed - moreover, we use the existing portal which has already successfully been used across the Nordic countries.

Activity 2.4 Social Networking

The main focus is to initiate, moderate and support the discussion of open education for all three sectors. This includes creating awareness and working towards openness regarding open educational resources. We have assigned one partner per sector to initiate the discussion - however, the social network enables discussions and cooperations across sectors to establish mutually beneficial cooperations in open education.

Workpackage 3: Project Management

The overall maintenance of the project, planning and co-ordination of activities and conferences will be one of the major responsibilities within this activity.

Activity 3.1 Project coordination

Duration (Start Month, End Month): 1-36

Outcome: Management coordination, reporting

Activity 3.2 Evaluation

Duration (Start Month, End Month): 13-36

Outcome: Evaluation plan, evaluation results, annual improvement reports

Activity 3.3 Dissemination

Duration (Start Month, End Month): 1-36

Outcome: papers, brochures, good practice reports, website

Budget

376.425