UNIVe Thematic Manual for Accessibility of information; exchange of study materials and courses

Authors:
Thematic Manual:
Karin Ruul, Estonian e-University (Estonia)

Analysis of projects:
• Hans Põldoja, University of Art and Design Helsinki, UIAH, Media Lab -
ARIADNE Foundation for the European Knowledge Pool
• Karin Ruul, Estonian e-University -
The Finnish Virtual University Online Courses Database
• Karin Ruul, Estonian e-University -
The Opintoluotsi Project
• The NETTUNO – Network per l’Università Ovunque Courses Database
• Cupido - Courses Database

1. Introduction

One of the ideas underlying the development of the small state eUniversity is to create a centralized web-based service where educational institutions can offer and users can easily find necessary information about education and training. An important aspect of the consortia is to enable the exchange of information and educational materials by having the best-suited web-based teaching system. All are promoting collaborative approaches, whereby teaching institutions are encouraged to cooperate to optimize their training tasks. Also standardization of the content of e-learning is an issue which needs to be examined and the best solution to be selected (e-learning platforms, interoperability, learning objects).

The aim of this group is to collect and analyze the experiences in developing courses and learning object databases for university consortia. Technical, legal as well as motivational issues are under discussion.

The workload of Accessibility of information subgroup was planned as following:
• Identification of different LO and course databases.
• Selection of five different examples (projects, frameworks, models) for further analyzes.
• Summarizing the analysis according to given framework.
• Resuming analysis to description of course and LO database, suitable for consortium-based e-university.

2. Analysis of existing experiences

For deeper analysis, five models were chosen:
• Ariadne
• The Finnish Virtual University Online Courses Database
• Opintoluotsi
• The NETTUNO – Network per l’Università Ovunque Courses Database
• Cupido - Courses Database

The framework for further analysis was following:
• Basic data about the project: name, scope (No of participants, other similar data), duration, financing body of the project.
• Project web-site, contact person for further information.
• Main outcomes of the project (results and description in some detail)
• Are any of these outcomes, in your mind, entirely and partly usable in the UNIVe project/ for small state consortium-based e-university? Which ones? Please describe these in detail.
• Is it practically possible to reuse the outcomes or apply the findings in the context of UNIVe? Are there any financial, legal etc. problems? Please specify.
• Changes, amendments needed for using the outcomes.
• Is there any follow-up for the project, are the outcomes in use, is the project still alive?
• Any other relevant information.

According to the framework, selected models were analyzed. Deeper analysis of models can be found on project’s web-page: http://www.e-uni.ee/Minerva/3tn.html