The objective of the project is to develop courseware that will be freely available under the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 licence. On the basis of a successful pilot, a further output of the project is to develop a model to initiate future projects for the benefit of the education sector at a system-wide level. The goal is to increase the quality of eLearning materials, increase flexibility in their re-use and significantly reduce the duplication of investment in their design, development and production. All materials are being developed using a modular approach to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance.
Benefits:
Efficiencies by eliminating the duplication of investment from the development of shared teaching resources.
Quality assured teaching resources
A structure in place for further collaborative resource development
Best Practice Design
Course materials are being developed as reusable content packages, with the level of granularity for the packages determined for each course to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance. Materials are being developed in XHTML that enables them to be transformed into different formats, and learning design and technical specifications include adherence to accessibility standards. Original source files and sample style sheets are available for download to enable educational organisations to contextualise materials to their particular student audience or delivery model if required.
To deliver the reference model or proof of concept, the project team is busy with developing open educational resources in the following areas:
Business - Certificate level, 6 courses
Information and Communications Technology, 1 course on Hardware Fundamentals
Building and Construction, 3 coursesThe infrastructure to support the show-casing and disseminating of course materials will be delivered via a combination of Moodle and the Fedora repository system.
This set of courses is scheduled for completion by April 2007.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure to support the show-casing and disseminating of course materials will be delived by a combination of Moodle and the Fedora repository system.
An ePortfolio provides the learner with the opportunity to store and present digital artefacts (written documents, photos, graphics etc.) There are diverse stakeholders to consider when designing an eportfolio system;
- learners (personal development planning, lifelong learning, reflective learning) - tutors (for teaching and assessment purposes)- managers (evidence of professional development)- peers (constructivist learning, study groups etc.)
- friends and family
- prospective employers (digital resume).
With such diverse interests it's important for the learner to be able to control the views that each community can see. For example I will show a prospective employer something markedly different to what I'm happy to show my friends. Social networking is also integral to a learner driven environment - the informal spaces analogous to what happens on a campus or school-yard.
Mahara is intended to provide a superior product in terms of functionality as well as sustainability, security, interoperability and stability over existing open source ePortfolio applications. ‘Mahara’ is Māori for ‘thought’ (think, memory, think upon, remember).
As part of the e-Learning Networked Education Pilot, Mahara will be deployed as MyPortfolio.ac.nz and have a single sign-on authentication with institutional Learning Management Systems. A pilot implementation commences in January 2007.
The purpose of this project is to design and build the infrastructure necessary to connect all of New Zealand’s digital research repositories that meet standards for interoperability and access.
New Zealand research institutions will have the necessary infrastructure and understanding to enable them to join with the global research community to establish a network of Institutional Repositories, into which authors deposit copies of their research outputs. This gives authors a way to make their research results available to anyone with Internet access. Anyone can search the full texts of deposited outputs in their field of research interest, wherever these are held. By putting research outputs in a repository, authors will enhance the visibility and impact not just of their research, but that of the whole New Zealand research sector.
A key part of the interoperability framework, users will be able to search from the network of repositories seamlessly from their course pages within the Learning Management System. Deployments of the hosted solutions commence January 2007. All of the project infrastructure is built using established international open source software, specifically:
- Fedora repository – Cornell University, USA
Public Knowledge Project Harvester – University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, Canada
Fez, a web front-end management system for Fedora, University of Queensland, Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Australia.
EPrints repository – University of Southampton, UK
Quality assured teaching resources.
A structure in place for further collaborative resource development.
