SELF (an acronym for “Science, Education and Learning in Freedom”) is an international project aiming to provide a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards. Learning standards and guidelines for the contents of the SELF Platform provide a common basis for the design of educational materials. 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.

The SELF Platform is a repository with free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards and an environment for the collaborative creation of new materials. Inspired by Wikipedia, the SELF Platform provides the materials in different languages and forms. The SELF Platform is also an instrument for evaluation, adaptation, creation and translation of these materials. Most importantly, the SELF Platform is a tool to unite community and professional efforts for public benefit.

SELF Consortium partner Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain) has researched digital format candidates to be used in the SELF Platform. While the SELF Platform collects content in an open standard it also follows didactic 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.

The Learning Standards Expert Group will advice, provide feedback and test demonstrating versions and the final version of the SELF Platform, emphasising the implementation of the learning standards. They define 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, consists of:

Dai Griffiths

Mr. Dai Griffiths is the Reader in eLearning at CETIS, The University of Bolton. A major theme in his projects was the use of eLearning interoperability specifications, and he has published extensively on this topic in journal papers, conference communications and book chapters.

Rosanna Forestello

Rosanna Forestello is professor in Sciences of Education, University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Argentina. Here she graduated in sciences of Education and holds a master in Education Multimedia at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Ms. Forestello is also University Professor in Theories of Teaching and Theories of Learning at the University of Villa María, Córdoba, Argentina, Pedagogical Adviser in Economic Sciences School at the University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Argentina, and Pedagogical Adviser in La Salle School, Cordoba, Argentina.

Rob Koper

Rob Koper is professor and director of learning technologies research at the Open University of the Netherlands. He publishes frequently in scholarly journals and edited various books and special issues of journals in the field of learning design and lifelong competence development.

Julià Minguillón

Julià Minguillón is lecturer Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), where he is leading a research group in e-learning, ontologies and user modeling in virtual environments for personalisation purposes. From November 1st, he is associate director of Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, IN3 (UOC's research institute).

M. Sasikumar

Dr Sasikumar heads the Artificial Intelligence and Educational Technology divisions of CDAC Mumbai (formerly NCST). His areas of research interest within Artificial Intelligence include planning and scheduling, natural language processing and data mining.

The SELF Platform is initiated by an international consortium of seven partners; three universities Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (India), and four non-profit organisations active as Free Software advocates: Internet Society (Netherlands), Free Software Foundation Europe (in all European countries), Internet Society (Bulgaria) and Fundación Vía Libre (Argentina). They work closely together to facilitate communities as well as to raise awareness and to contribute to the building of critical mass for the use of Free Software and Open Standards. The SELF Platform aims to be a community of all interested parties associated with educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. The SELF Platform specifically embraces universities, schools, training centres, Free Software communities, software companies, publishers and government bodies. All users are encouraged to participate in the production process and the exploitation of results.