elearning_label_higher_education
Young European Love Languages
Young Europeans Love Languages (YELL) is a network of European partners committed to promote language learning as a key skill of lifelong learning.
The project (2009-2011) identified a number of tools to raise awareness and to demonstrate the importance of language learning and produced the YELL Handbook, targeted at multipliers in non-formal and formal education, providers of cultural, social and sport activities for young people.
The Handbook provides insight on how to implement best practices on raising awareness about cultural diversity and motivation of young people to learn foreign languages. The tools are designed for all education and vocational qualification institutions and for the trainers.
The project also produced the Virtual Documentation Center, an on-line database of examples of good practise in the field of innovative and creative ways of language learning in non-formal and informal contexts.
The YELL 2 project was launched in April 2013 to to disseminate the results of the network and to raise awareness of the Virtual Documentation Centre. The consortium of partners from Germany, UK and Turkey, aims to extend the user base of their online database and to enhance the tool by gathering additional Best Practice resources from around Europe.
ODS Opening Day Conference
The workshop seminar “Open Digital Resources in Education & School Innovation”, hosted by the Open Discovery Space (ODS) European initiative, will take place in Ellinogermaniki Agogi (Greece), on 20 June 2013.
Teachers of all subjects and levels, educational professionals, policy makers and repository contributors are invited to attend this ODS Opening Day event.
The use of online content and the relevant innovative teaching techniques are reshaping the modern school. Though extremely exciting, acquiring knowledge of such tools is not an easy task. The ODS workshop seminar aims at building the necessary structures and networks that will facilitate the introduction and embracing of e-learning by the teaching community.
Talks on a range of relevant issues, such as European e-learning policies, the role of e-learning in the Opening up Education agenda, the development of multilingual educational social media and what ODS can offer to a school, will be followed by presentations of innovative teaching practices, involving e-learning sources, as well as a two-hour workshop on how to use the available resources on ODS, how to create a school e-library on ODS and how to build an ODS community of teachers and schools.
EDEN 2013
The EDEN 2013 Conference, which will take place in Oslo (Norway) on 12-15 June under the title “The Joy of Learning”, will present the latest best practice in online and distance learning, share progressive concepts, inventive solutions, and promote joint-thinking and collaboration.
E-learning, open and distance education have been increasingly important fields of intellectual excitement and innovative development. The challenges posed by the new technologies are permanent, and students constantly keep teachers under pressure to develop. How can we do our best to make learning a thrilling experience for learners, including providing a sense of joy in the virtual classroom?
The question is an exciting one and discussion and debate in EDEN 2013 will provide a range of innovative theories and approaches. The conference programme includes plenaries, parallel sessions with paper presentations, workshops, moderated poster and demo sessions.
Among the keynote speakers: Kristin Halvorsen, Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, and Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University (UK) and winner of the TED Prize 2013.
The event will start on Wednesday afternoon on 12 June, with Pre-Conference Workshops and Registration, followed by the Welcome Cocktail, and will end with a Farewell Coffee on 15 June.
Serendipity - a search engine for OpenCourseWare
Serendipity is a faceted search engine for OpenCourseWare.
The main purpose of the service is to provide students, teachers and self-learners with a faceted search engine which allows them to find and discover open educational resources related to OCW from the OpenCourseWareConsortium and OCW-Universia.
A presentation of Serendipity, presented at OCWC Global 2013 is available here.
HoTEL open call for e-learning innovators
The HoTEL (Holistic Approach to Technology Enhanced Learning) project has launched an open call for e-learning innovators, aiming to spot “innovations” dealing with the use of ICT for education at large.
The objective of the call is to transform bright new ideas and research results into mainstream practices and to disseminate them throughout Europe.
The selected participants will be able to test their “innovation” in real world settings within three virtual laboratories (Exploratoriums) in the fields of higher education, corporate learning and informal learning that the HoTEL project has set up with the support of the EC’s FP7 programme.
The call is open from the 1st of June to the end of July 2013, but the project activities will go until summer of 2014.
Launched in 2012, the HoTEL Support Action aims to contribute to more effective, holistic and faster innovation cycles in European TEL, by increasing quality at the level of the cycle itself and of the different phases foreseen, that can be replicated in the future.
Open Educational Resources and Mobile Technology to Narrow the Learning Divide
As the world becomes more digitized, there will be an increasing need to make available learning resources in electronic format for access by information and communication technologies. The question education will face is whether these learning resources will be available for learners to access at no cost or affordable cost, so that there will be equity in access by anyone regardless of location, status, or background. ground.
Mohamed Ally (Athabasca University, Canada) and Mohammed Samaka (Qatar University, Qatar) analyse in the paper “Open Educational Resources and Mobile Technology to Narrow the Learning Divide”, published by the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, how the use of mobile technology to deliver OER will provide equal opportunity for everyone to learn, by allowing access to educational materials from anywhere and at any time.
MOOC Research - Call for Proposals
MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) is to award grants in the range of $10,000 – $25,000 to explore the potential of MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary credentials through more personalized, more affordable pathways. The grant is lead and administered by Athabasca University.
MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a set of investments intended to explore the potential of MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary credentials through more personalized, more affordable pathways.
Grants will be made available in the range of $10,000 – $25,000. The grant is lead and administered by Athabasca University. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports Athabasca University and interested academic institutions through research grants to examine the efficacy of early MOOC models for various learner audiences and in a wide variety of contexts.
Call for articles on Design for Learning Spaces and Innovative Classrooms - eLearning Papers
eLearning Papers has just announced a call for papers for its next issue, which will be dedicated to the theme Design for Learning Spaces and Innovative Classrooms. The deadline for submissions is 28 July, 2013.
Issue number 34 of eLearning Papers will explore practices and experiences in designing learning spaces specifically for innovative and creative classrooms. The editorial board encourages authors to submit contributions addressing one or several of the following topics of interest:
- Experiences about the design and implementation of innovative learning spaces
- Creative learning spaces to inspire teachers and students
- Learning spaces for different purposes to motivate different types of learning
- Designing flexible learning spaces to accommodate innovative pedagogies
- Design and teamwork in developing the e-mature school environment
- Designing and refurbishing schools and classrooms for 21st century learning
- Redefining physical space and time (ubiquitous learning)
- Innovative experiences with learning spaces
The tentative publication date is around the end of August 2013. For further information and to submit your article you may visit this page or contact Laia Canals, current chief editor, at editorialteam[at]elearningeuropa.info
Agrega2
Agrega2 is an OER platform developed by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, the Autonomous Communities and Red.es.
The Agrega2 platform aggregates the pre-college educational digital repositories of all the Ministries of Education of the Spanish Autonomous Communities. The contents are organised according to the curriculum and are ready to be downloaded and used by teachers and students.
The platform has access nodes in all the Ministries of Education of the Autonomous Communities (CCAA) and the Institute of Educational Technology (ITE) and Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (MECD).
MDX (Learning Materials Online)
MDX (Learning Materials Online) is a cooperative repository offering open education resources produced by several universities from Catalonia and the Valencian Community (Spain).
The purpose of MDX is to make the participant institutions’ teaching production more visible and widespread, thus contributing to educational innovation, on the one hand, and free access to knowledge on the other.
The aims of MDX are:
- To facilitate the management of teaching materials and objects produced by the universities by arranging them and integrating them within a common server.
- To offer the academic staff of the participating universities a resource server that allows the materials produced to be filed and subsequently retrieved.
- To provide users with permanent, simple and fast access to the teaching production of member organisations.
- To add value to the materials collected through elements such as the permanent address, standardised citations or consultation data.
- To establish and apply preservation mechanisms in order to ensure the durability of the materials.
- To encourage the publishing and editing of teaching materials in electronic formats.