Creating and sharing OER in primary and secondary education: challenges and strategies Francesc Busquets Educational Network of Catalonia (XTEC)

Public Education in Catalonia ● About public schools, 10 5 teachers, 10 6 students ● Two official languages: Spanish and Catalan ● New Education Law (2006), focused on the work on key competences ● Main challenges: multicultural integration, improvement of academic results

ICT in Education in Catalonia ● Official program started in 1986 ● XTEC: Public Telematic Educational Network, offering Internet services since 1995 to all Catalan teachers and schools. ● Creation and sharing of educational materials by teachers, stimulated by in-service teacher training ● Promotion of free software and collaborative projects ● 1x1 plan for secondary education, started in 2009

OER repositories in the XTEC (I) ● Open source authoring tools for teachers and associated repositories: ● JClic ● Quaderns Virtuals (Virtual Notebooks) ● La Prestatgeria (The bookshelf) ● alexandria: Moodle and IWB resources ● edu365.cat: student's portal ● edu3.cat: video and audio productions

JClic ● Open source (GPL) platform for activities in diverse modes (relating, ordering, identifying, classifying...) ● Made with Java ● Same application, several delivery formats: Applet, Stand-alone frame, Java WebStart application

JClic collaborative project ● ClicZone: open space for collaboration and exchange of learning objects between educators ● ● Library with more than projects and activities, in different languages

Virtual Notebooks (QV) ● Implementation of the IMS QTI standard ● Authoring tool for teachers ● Control of play conditions and student's answers ● Integrated in Moodle ● Library with 200 notebooks created by teachers ●

Alexandria ● Space to share Moodle and Interactive Whiteboard resources created by teachers ● Based on the OpenLearn Moodle repository ● Open source development ●

La Prestatgeria (The bookshelf) ● Creation, edition and sharing of digital books ● llibres ● Exports to SCORM, PDF and other formats ● Open source development, based on MyScrapbook

edu365.cat ● Started in 2001 ● Digital learning resources for students ● More than interactive educational objects ● > hours of interaction ● Student's desktops with specific tools ●

edu3.cat ● Media content portal with more than video and audio clips ● Joint project between the Catalan Public Broadcasting Corporation and the Department of Education ● Free to use in classrooms ●

OER repositories in the XTEC (II) ● Metadata repositories and associated networks and search engines: ● Merlí: Bank of LOM metadata, search engine and structured resource organizer ● Agrega: Authoring tool and federated network of SCORM resources (Spanish project - Catalan node in progress) ● LRE: European network of OER metadata repositories

Merlí ● LOM metadata about OER ● Search engine and structured resource organizer ● Teachers can enrich metadata with comments and ratings ● open source development ●

Agrega ● Project leaded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Regional Governments ● Network of repositories of SCORM objects ● Cataloged with LOM.es, a specific application profile of LOM ● Open source development ●

Learning Resource Exchange ● Project leaded by European Schoolnet ● Network of repositories of OER metadata ● Fruit of the european projects Celebrate, MELT and LRE ● Teachers can enrich metadata ●

Weaknesses and challenges (I) ● Irregular quality of resources ● Copyright issues in assets used in some OER created by teachers: lack of knowledge about legal issues ● Resources with poor or null metadata ● Some repositories have oversized metadata profiles

Weaknesses and challenges (II) ● Dispersion of formats and publishing platforms ● Interoperability issues (also using standards!) ● Lack of feedback. Users can comment and rate resources, but usually don't do it

Our current strategies and actions (I) ● Reinforcement of Merli as a common pool of metadata and central search engine ● Linking of networks and repositories, allowing extended and specialized search of resources ● Simplification of user interfaces and metadata mandatory schemes ● Tagging must be easy for teachers

Our current strategies and actions (II) ● Official recognition of the work made by authors of OER (awards, featuring...) ● Inclusion into in-service teacher training programs of information about legal issues, copyright, licensing and rights and duties related to OER ● Use of Moodle as a central point of delivery and interaction with OER

Thank you!