FVU Newsletter November - December 2008
In this Issue:
- FVU Launches a Referee Service for Online Learning Material
- Archiving and Management of Copyright Agreements of Digital Learning Material Advancing
- eLene Teaching and Learning Centre – Learn to Use It and Add Your Own Content!
- A Working Group Set Up by the Board of Directors to Plan for FVU’s Future
- Re.ViCa Project Reviewing Traces of European Virtual Campuses
- Publications
Forthcoming international conferences in the Nordic countries
23 - 24 January 2009 Educa 2009 | Finland’s largest nationwide training event in the field of education, Educa 2009, gathers together teachers and headmasters from different educational levels at the Helsinki Fair Centre. The Educa seminars will explore the present state of education and schooling.
29-31 January, 2009 Lifelong Learning as a Right? European Perspectives. 11th International LLinE Conference, Helsinki, Finland | The rhetoric of many national governments and international organisations views lifelong learning as a right for everyone. But what is the reality of lifelong learning – is it a right that is fulfilled in Europe today? How can LLL promote inclusion, empowerment, and democratisation? This conference introduces paper and poster presentations on research, case studies and projects relevant to the theme. A selection of papers will be published in the LLinE journal in 2009.
FVU Launches a Referee Service for Online Learning Material
The Finnish Virtual University (FVU) services will expand at the beginning of next year with the launch of a referee service for online learning material. The service aims to increase shared use of quality online learning material produced in universities, and to acknowledge the work of the developers and evaluators of the material.
The service was developed in a two-year project that produced a set of evaluation criteria and a service model to be used in quality assessment of online learning material, based on national and international evaluation criteria of online learning material and 25 pilot assessments. The assessment is based on common usability and pedagogical, contentual and instrumental criteria. The criteria used for referee assessment were based on scope, ease of use and lightness. The aim was to create an assessment model that is extensive but does not excessively burden the referees.
The referee service defines online learning material as an educational entity with its own contentual requirements and goals set for learning, and which is available via the Internet. The service focuses on reviewing online learning material that the producer wants to offer for shared use and for which the producer wants a referee evaluation quality mark.
Referee service to start at the beginning of 2009
Developers and producers of online learning material can order a quality assessment for their material via the online referee service, to be launched at the beginning of 2009. The referee editor provided by the service will take charge of gathering a referee group and coordinating the different phases of the assessment process. The referees, recruited nationwide, will be experts in university pedagogy and the discipline concerned, and they will assess the material according to the criterion groups.
As a result of the assessment, the client will receive a detailed assessment report with a grade for each criterion group and an overall grade. Information on the quality assessment will also be available in the online service. Users will be able to comment on the assessment information, and their comments can be viewed in the service.
The assessment information will also be stored in the meta-information of the material in the digital material archive or the learning platform. The meta-information will include the numeric overall grade received in the assessment and a link to the assessment information available in the referee service. Users of online learning material can search for refereed material, for example, in the digital material archive. This will help users to select quality material and find inspiration when developing their own online learning material.
Archiving and Management of Copyright Agreements of Digital Learning Material Advancing
FVU’s publication channel project, ending at the end of the year, explored possibilities to develop the publishing of digital material at universities. Development of digital material archives was emphasised, with a particular focus on making the copyright agreement process of digital learning material part of the publication process of the material.The project tested a contract management system developed by Dr.Elma Ltd., as well as its compatibility with a DSpace-based digital repository application. The idea was to connect these two systems in order to form an entity that would enable the process of making a publication contract and saving it to be handled digitally. As an alternative to Dr.Elma Ltd’s software, the project explored a built-in contract management functionality of the DSpace software.
When exploring these two alternative realisations, it was found out that contract management is a complex entity, and neither of the solutions was able to manage it totally. The greatest problem and future challenge was supporting the needs of the contracting parties with software. In simple cases, it was sufficient to make contracting a straightforward phase of the publication process. In more complicated contract cases, for example those involving several contracting parties, the software did not support the process sufficiently due to problems in identification, among other things.
A publication archive adopted by the University of Jyväskylä
The project also involved pilot cases that were used to improve digital material archiving in the participating universities. The University of Jyväskylä introduced a digital archive called JYX, which during its first year grew into a significant repository of digital material. The JYX archive was complemented with features supporting publication processes, archiving and data transfer. These features included attaching URN identification to the material data, using the university’s user identification system to identify and authorise archive users, and transferring metadata to the Nelli portal (National Electronic Library Interface) using the SRU interface.
The University of Jyväskylä has found the JYX archive very useful, and the intention is to continue maintaining and developing the archive, and to expand its use within the university after the project has ended. The Tampere University of Technology (TUT) was another university to introduce a digital material archive of its own during the project period. One key detail of the development work carried out in TUT was enabling the use of HAKA user identification with the DSpace archive.
It remains to be seen how Finnish universities’ digital material archives will develop and what roles will be given to the participating organisations (the National Library of Finland, the University of Helsinki and other universities).
eLene Teaching and Learning Centre – Learn to Use It and Add Your Own Content!
The eLene Teaching and Learning Centre, a resource centre developed by the eLene partners, is a web-based repository of ICT-supported teaching and learning resources, tools and applications. Registered users can add tools in the service that they have found useful in ICT-supported teaching and learning. The service is available in English, but you can add new resources in any language.
The TL Centre is targeted at higher education teachers and education developers, teacher trainers of educational ICT use, as well as specialists in educational technology, students and decision-makers. The interactive 3D mini-scenarios game guides end-users in different roles to find suggested resources for their particular needs. Also more traditional search form is available in the Resources menu. The main page shows five most recently added and five most popular, as well as most frequently rated resources.
Each tool or resource in the Centre has a detailed description card (ID card). At the moment, the Centre contains LOM-based description data for 244 tools and resources, originating in 16 different countries. By joining the eLene TL Centre community, you will have the chance to add resources in the Centre that you have either produced yourself or have found useful. Please register as a user and fill in an ID card, following the instructions given on the website.
The best way to keep up with the most recently added tools, publications and other resources is to subscribe to the RSS feed of the service.
A Working Group Set Up by the Board of Directors to Plan for FVU’s Future
In a meeting held on 5 November, the FVU Board of Directors decided to set up a working group to plan a reorganisation of the virtual university functions in Finland. The task of the working group is to draw up a plan on how the functions of FVU can be carried out in the future and how its current services (e.g. the Joopas portal) can be organised in 2010 and beyond.The need to set up the working group was based on a comment that the Finnish Council of University Rectors issued after discussing the funding of FVU for 2010–2012. Among other things, the Council stated the following: “The Council does not support continuing the FVU functions in the current form. The Council considers that the current structures of FVU should be dismantled in a controlled way. Well-functioning services, such as Joopas.fi (Online Flexible Study Rights Service), should be continued but organised and funded differently in the future.”
Five members were nominated for the working group: Rector Matti Jakobsson, Rector Matti Pursula and Vice Rector Erno Lehtinen, Director of the FVU Service Unit Lena Levander, and Development Manager Julian Lindberg as a representative of the Service Unit staff. The statement of the working group will be discussed in a meeting of the Advisory Board of the Finnish Virtual University Consortium on 24 March 2009.
The Executive Board saw it important that the FVU's strategic Issue Groups would discuss ways in which FVU’s functions would be organised in the future, drawing up an assessment of how the universities’ joint activities could be continued and what would be the preconditions of preserving the cooperation network.
Re.ViCa Project Reviewing Traces of European Virtual Campuses
Through the experience of past and present projects that have explored and refined the concepts of Virtual Campus and Virtual Mobility, a gradual shift of concepts is noticed from the clear, "well-defined" online Virtual Campus to Virtual Mobility and Blended Learning, whereby the more traditional universities open their doors, collaborate supra/intra institutionally and often (inter)nationally, and/or involve non-traditional students through e-learning. As a matter of fact, there is no absolute definition of Virtual Campus or Virtual Mobility anymore. Every campus becomes a Virtual Campus, and every kind of mobility has some form of Virtual Mobility included.Re.ViCa project compares in-depth studies of European cases with selected non-European initiatives of the past decade within higher education at European, national and regional levels. It looks at cross-institutional Virtual Campus initiatives that are fully active, that have been discontinued or merged with other initiatives or, in particular, that have continued, albeit with a modified structure, within higher education.
The main objective of the Re.ViCa project is to identify measures of success, best practices and generic parameters that influence the outcome of a Virtual Campus initiative, based on thorough research and expert input. This review will lead to a taxonomy of cross-institutional Virtual Campuses and will be complemented by recommendations for the different groups of stakeholders.
The Re.ViCa Consortium organises in-depth discussions at various stages of the project, to incorporate the input of different interest groups including Virtual Campus management bodies, relevant networks, students, policy makers and a range of experts at a global as well as European level.
The Re.Vica International Advisory Committee consists of 26 European and non-European experts from South Africa, Australia, Canada and Latin America in the field of Virtual Campuses, who have so far gathered together twice. The first of these key meetings took place in June, in Lisbon, Portugal, and the second one in early December in Berlin, Germany.
The results of the research will be published in a comprehensive wiki, which will be open to public at the end of the project in autumn 2009. The Re.ViCa project is funded by the EU Lifelong Learning Programme. Helsinki University of Technology, Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli is one of the partners.
Further information: http://revica.europace.org/
Publications
Hämäläinen, Raija (2008): University of Jyväskylä Finnish Institution for Educational Research, Research Reports 24 | This study provides knowledge of collaboration scripts as a pedagogical method to facilitate group processes in virtual environments in authentic educational contexts. The findings indicate that scripts as external support can help students proceed in solving learning tasks. Publication is available online in pdf format (pdf, 1,2MB).
Lahti Henna (2008): Department of Home Economics and Craft Science Research Reports | The aim of the study was to analyze and facilitate collaborative design in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Availble online in Helsinki University eThesis service.