Contents

Since its kick-off in July 2006 several important parts towards the realisation of the Platform have been researched and put into practice. This SELF News Edition outlines the progress in each area.

For information about the official launch of the first version of the Platform on September 5, 2007, please go to http://selfproject.eu/launch !

1. Learning Materials
2. Learning Standards
3. Legal Policy
4. SELF Platform Definition
5. Quality Assessment
6. Community Building
7. Organisational Strengthening
8. Agenda
9. About

1. Learning Materials

An important element of the SELF Project is research on available materials and detection of potential gaps. During the search of educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards, hundreds of freely available materials were inspected and classified into different categories and subcategories. This work had a primary value, detecting resources suitable for their inclusion in the SELF Platform after the necessary modifications. As a side effect and added value, the results of the search allowed the identification of dark spots, areas where the coverage of materials published under free licenses is poor or clearly insufficient. Those areas are the main gaps that will be considered for further research of available materials and eventually for the production of new materials inside the SELF Project. In all cases, reported gaps are accompanied with recommendations and guidelines to be considered later during a further search of available materials and the development of new materials inside the SELF Platform.

The result is a list of over 40 high-quality, up-to-date materials that have been, or will be, atomised and imported in the SELF Platform by the members of the SELF Consortium.

2. Learning Standards

SELF Consortium partner Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain) has researched digital format candidates to be used in the SELF Platform. The SELF team has described e-learning standards that can be used internally by the SELF Platform to manage learning materials. We have outlined the need for keeping the SELF Platform not only collect content in an open standard, but also follow learning content standards for its own operation. This ensures that all the content collected into the Platform, as well as what gets distributed from it will confirm to the widely used open standards.

In November 2006 the Learning Standards Expert Group (LSEG) has been constituted in order to help define the learning standards and guidelines for the contents of the Platform. They advice, provide feedback and test demonstrating versions and the final version of the SELF Platform, emphasising the implementation of the learning standards. The LSEG defines common goals and structures for different kinds of educational materials. This group is formed by experts in the field of Learning Objects (LOM, SCORM and/or IMS-LD) to give advice in the definition of the information used to label the SELF contents and to create the structure of the SELF repository. The Expert Group, led by David Megias (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) consists of Dai Griffiths (CETIS, The University of Bolton, USA), Rosanna Forestello (University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Argentina), Rob Koper (Open University of the Netherlands), Julià Minguillón (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain), and Dr. M. Sasikumar (CDAC, Mumbai).

The standards that are recommended for adoption are well researched and there exists sufficient flexibility in their design. However, the process these standards attempted to model is a dynamic cultural process, namely, education. Our strategy provides scope for flexibility, and support for alternative models of education. The SELF Platform will provide a mechanism to model different styles of delivering content. It is even more desirable to provide a mechanism to creatively model the process of education. Considering that the Platform will adapt a semantic web model, these possibilities can be addressed by our Platform. The power the semantic web offers is the possibility to package and distribute the same resources in several different ways without disturbing the resources. Therefore we will explore the possibilities of providing the freedom of how a learner wants to learn. This will also keep the spirit of "learning in freedom", the motto of the SELF project, embellished in the design of the Platform.

3. Legal Policy

Software from project partners and third parties will be checked for licensing and compliance with the SELF legal policy. In contentious cases, solutions guaranteeing the long-term legal sustainability will be worked out and implemented. The Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) will be adapted and implemented, including the associated administrative overhead. Cases of attempted propertising will be investigated, communicated and mediated. Likewise, educational material from both Consortium partners and third parties will be brought into compliance with the SELF legal policy and potential issues will be identified and resolved.

In parallel, the Legal Expert Group has been set up and the participation of other legal experts will be encouraged in order to assure the adherence to the SELF legal policy beyond the EC funding period. The LEG consists of: Shane Coughlan (Freedom Task Force), Robin Gross (IP Justice), Lucie Guibault (Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam), Mathias Klang (Göteborg University), Catharina Maracke (Creative Commons), Axel Metzer (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law Hamburg), Jonas Öberg (Göteborg University and Free Software Foundation Europe), Mary Wong (Franklin Pierce Law Centre) and Raquel Xalabarder (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain).

The SELF Legal Policy outlines the definitions used in the SELF project as well as the policies for decisions regarding important legal matters, how to come to terms with potential contradictions and how to assure the legal maintainability of the project after the funding period from the European Commission.

4. SELF Platform Definition

The official launch of the first version of the SELF Platform will take place on September 5th, 2007, initially from The Netherlands. The Platform will be launched in an early stage to involve early users and allow for their input. The launch will take place during a conference on Free Software in education and the day will consist of keynote speakers and panel discussions. Simultaneously several satellite events to the launch in The Netherlands are planned in Sweden, Bulgaria, Argentina, Mexico and India with workshops and conferences.

For more information and registration, see http://selfproject.eu/launch

The SELF Platform is a web-based platform where users can go and find information and educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards, while at the same time it is a collaborative production environment for the creation of new materials and improvement and translation of existing materials. Based on the project definition, the content structure of the SELF Platform has been defined. This implied to identify the main content groups and categories as well as establish their mutual relations. More concretely, this is to define, for instance, how users can approach the web platform and go from general information to educational materials and vice versa, from educational materials to the content repository and from one language to others. Moreover, the production process flow has been analysed and the best methods to streamline and facilitate this are defined as easy participation of users in the creation and translation process is fundamental. After this a set of high-level technical specifications have been defined. These include, for example, how users can register to participate, how quality assurance mechanisms work, to what formats educational materials can be exported, etc.

The SELF team has defined the implementation details for the development and produced a first pilot-version of the system. In short, the SELF Platform needs to cover the following functions: a Secure Web Server, a Web Application Framework, a database, a Content Management System, a Version Control System, a search engine, an agent-oriented and semantic-web enabled Platform, an authoring system for creating packages that work in an LMS (Learning Management System) and rating system to facilitate indicators of quality.

An implementation of the SELF Platform is produced. This Platform is based on existing free software technologies. The choice of technology has been based on stability, support for all languages, scalability and based on inter-operable distributed database technologies inspired by semantic web. The engine is based on GnowSYS (http://www.gnowledge.org/gnowsys), a distributed semantic knowledge base. The SELF Platform is a multi-user system. The content will be sufficiently granular to support re-usability in multiple modules of the system, with structural and functional relations established between the objects in the knowledge base. Interoperability and adhering to open standards of data encoding of the Platform ensure that the content will be accessible to other elearning or knowledge engineering systems in the software universe. The system provides the content as web-services (as defined in the semantic web model) so that the knowledge base developed will be accessible for other elearning systems through standard protocols like WSDL.

Major work is now directed on the authoring interface, handling of meta data, application of the data models required for the selected standards (such as SCORM), multilingual capabilities and the import and export of data, and the Technical Expert Group is being set up. A comprehensive documentation describing the architecture and functioning of the system will be made and published as a technical report. A distribution of the software and content developed by the SELF system will be made available for replication, and backup. An ISO-image of the system and relevant content will be made available for the EC for distribution on CD or DVD.

5. Quality Assessment

Quality Assessment is essential to evaluate a high quality level of the SELF content. SELF aims at delivering contents its users can rely on being accurate and useful in class. However, decentralized, collaborative authoring lends itself poorly to run-of-the-mill approaches to quality control.

The Quality Assessment Expert Group's job is to come up with innovative mechanisms that can harness the power of loosely-coupled collaboration to achieve the apparently contradictory goals of delivering high-quality content without placing obstacles to the community's free-wheeling creativity.

The QAEG advises the development team, exploring different approaches of appraising learning material's quality without imposing rigid structure to the material's creation process. It applies those mechanisms to materials in the project, and experiments with different ways of interpreting social dynamics and weight assignment to different criteria. It identifies different dimensions in which a material can be evaluated, such as technical accuracy, pedagogical usefulness, popularity, etc., and finds ways to combine them into an aggregate quality rating. It interacts with the SELF community to collaboratively evaluate the results of the appraisal, and finds ways to make them match general quality perception as closely as possible.

The Quality Assessment Expert Group is led by Federico Heinz of Fundación Via Libre, a member of the SELF consortium. The group's members include: Beatriz Busaniche (Fundación Vía Libre), Machtelt Garrels (The Linux Documentation Project), Núria Ferran Ferrer (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain), Rosanna Forestello (Fundación Vía Libre), Markus Deimann (FernUniversität Hagen), and Nagarjuna G. (HBCSE).

6. Community Building

The self-sustainable character of the Platform is assured by the inclusion of new members, well organised internal procedures and an international conference to bridge the transition to the new SELF community beyond the SELF Consortium. An initial list is built on the targets proposed by each of the teams. Some of these organisations can contribute materials to the SELF Platform, others are potential users that can benefit from those materials and improve them. There is yet another group of organisations that can help spread the word and promote SELF, even when they do not directly contribute to or benefit from it. The building of a community has been taking place from the beginning of the project and will naturally be an on-going process.

7. Organisational Strengthening

Founding Principles

We have put into action a set of founding principles that reflect our shared thoughts and ideas as a basis for the development of the Platform. These founding principles help guide our work over time and are the means by which we articulate what is and has been intrinsically important to the organisation.

SELF Advisory Board

The SELF Advisory Board members play a key role in the development and implementation of the SELF Platform. The board strengthens links with the target groups who should benefit from the SELF Platform and helps with generating ideas to make the SELF project become self-sustainable. The members of the SELF Advisory Board will participate at a strategic level, bringing together communities and knowledge as well as raising awareness. As the target groups consist of several actors and regions, the Advisory Board mirrors these to create an on-going link with individuals and organisations.

The diverse SELF Advisory Board is comprised of the following professionals: Susan D’Antoni (Virtual Institute of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning), Elmar Geese (LIVE Linux-Verband, OpenForum Europe, ODF Alliance, Open Document Foundation, OASIS SOA and OASIS Office Standardisation Working Groups), Heather Ford (iCommons), Masayuki Ida (Graduate School of International Management and the School of International Politics, Economics and Business, Aoyama Gakuin University, Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum), Anne Østergaard (GNOME Foundation Board of Directors), and Susy Struble (Sun Microsystems)

Expert Groups

Several Expert Groups have been set up to help with specific goals, form and content of the SELF Project. Lead by members of the Executive Committee, the Expert Groups prepare advices and execute daily operations in different areas: Learning Standards, Quality Assessment, Learning Materials, Technology, Legal, and PR / Media. Organisations and companies as well as particular experts are invited to participate in each group.

SELF Support Programme

Apart from internal strengthening of the organisation much progress has been made with various forms of partnerships. While SELF is started with public funding from the European Commission, a community of users and contributors is built up to make sure the ongoing success. Contributions can come in many kinds, such as involvement in the creation process of new materials, communication towards potentially interested users, infrastructure etc. We foresee that the SELF Platform in order for it to become successful should both include active individuals as well as contributing partner organisations. We have envisioned the basic principles for a partnership strategy, which we call the SELF Support Programme (SSP). SELF can benefit from many different types of contributions. We have organised them into four main sections: Education, Technology and Services, External Communications, and Distribution. In the coming months we will be inviting organisations to join the programme, thereby complementing the user activities and help us make a sustainable organisation.

8. Agenda

De Doelenzaal, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Goteburg University, Göteborg, Sweden
Francophone Center, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria
Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Tamaulipas, Mexico
Universidad de Cordoba, Cordoba, Argentina

SELF Platform Launch, 7 September 2007

Homi Bhabha Institute for Science Education, Mumbai, India

Conference on Open Source in Education and Language Learning Online

28-29 September 2007, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

• 29 September 2007, 14:30 Jonas Öberg (UGOT, FSFE), “SELF: a platform for the collaborative development of learning materials on Free Software and Open Standards”
  

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

9. About

SELF News is a monthly newsletter about the SELF Project and related issues. SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

Information about SELF:
http://selfproject.eu/

Consortium Partners:

• Internet Society Netherlands
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Goteburg University
• Internet Society Bulgaria
• Fundación Vía Libre
• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
  

Newsletter editor:
Hinde ten Berge <self@selfproject.eu>

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