Filtered by category Consortium, 1 - 7 of 7 Postings (
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Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Benjamin Brink 30 Jun 2017, at 05:48 AM
Present: Caroline, Cesar, Carlos, Jesús, Gustaf, Rocael.
Summary:
- Cesar will research and advise on restricted grants model of funding for specific projects in non-profit work:
Restricted grants ARE possible:
We just have to be careful to account for them and we have to make sure that we don't spend beyond the grant.
Cesar: Also let me know what kind of use a restricted grant might take, from whom it might come, and I will research further.
- Google Coop, suggested by Caroline, will post a news items so people add related sites:
the uses I see are to make it easier for new people to find documentation and use cases about the technology as it tends to be distributed on different sites, vendors pages, blogs etc.
- Some institutions need special type of invoices in order to be able to do payments, institutions will request special type of invoices, then will be determined how to proceed within the Consortium.
- About promotion, to be effective we need news, about releases, capabilities, others.
Cesar elaborated a news about IMS-LD. Carlos will check.
.LRN Board members agree to write down about the work in progress they are doing in different topics, and put them on wiki page so we collaborate on them.
IMSLD_Announcement_Significance_Draft
- SCORM compliant: the platform needs to be SCORM compliant if we want to have the required market in our institutions.
- Solidify dates for .LRN Spring Conference (Gustaf) and help him get things running for that
Dates are as sent by Gustaf. Will check if possible extra days / rooms.
- Send out invoices for 2007 membership fees (RHR and CRB)
Check status here: Members
We need to elaborate the short "Membership Benefits", will ask help to Cesar.
Membership_Benefits
- We agree to put minutes on the wiki at openacs.org.
Actions:
- Clarify legal and tax status (CRB)
- Send out final invoices for conference sponsorship and enter expenses (CRB)
- Send out invoices for 2007 membership fees (RHR and CRB)
- Check SCORM status
- Check IMS-LD news item
Next meeting:
To be determined using doodle.ch.
Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Benjamin Brink 30 Jun 2017, at 05:47 AM
.LRN meeting 6-march-2007
- Cesar submitted our IMS LD news to Mass High Tech (local angle), Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Educause this AM.
- Next topic for publication: Zen project (us being an accessible toolkit), Cesar volunteer to write something and publish.
Consortium finances, from Carl:
Here are the expenditures:
(for the conference)
$30.00 11 05 OCT UNITED 0164066433570 PUNE 411057 IL
$436.40 12 05 OCT UNITED 0162148107562 PUNE 411057 IL
$436.40 05 OCT UNITED 0162148107563 PUNE 411057 IL
$1,098.24 SUMMER SHACK BOSTON MA
$357.58 BEST WESTERN HOTELS BOSTON MA
$1,870.00 Room Rental Total
$1,701.00 Food And Beverage Total
$1,050.00 Audio Visual:
$100.00 Parking and Security:
--------------
Expenses for the conference: $6,722.04
- Carl transfered all paypal funds to the bank and will put paypal in quickbooks for automated integration.
- Fees need to go first to a small reserve to pay anticipatedannual legal and tax-related fees for the consortium. $2,500 is fairly modest amount.
- Valencia's extra funds (~1,100 euros) are earmarked for .LRN releases.We expect to have a "paypal contribute link". But we should just check with our tax acct.
- SCORM support is a very important priority.
- Carl will send information about Release Management for next .LRN release, so board can make a decision on what is possible to fund.
- Rocael will start invoicing this week.
Assited: Carlos, Jesus, Carl, Caroline, Cesar, Rocael.
Created by Cesar Brea, last modified by Gustaf Neumann 16 Jun 2017, at 09:24 AM
In case you missed it, which of course is only true for a very small percentage of you, OpenACS/.LRN recently announced that it was the first software platform to support the new IMS LD standard.
What is this all about, and why should you care? Here's the short version:
Online learning, whether as an extension of offline learning in a classroom or as a pure proposition itself, has become a big deal and will continue to grow in importance. One of the things that will continue to drive this is the growing availability of free, open, high-quality educational content online. A popular example of this is MIT's seminal OpenCourseWare initiative, which in addition to becoming an incredibly useful resource itself around the world has also spawned other similar efforts. But OpenCourseWare initially consists largely of static content -- syllabi, tests, etc. What about interactive learning materials?
To make sure that interactive content developed by one instructor could be "played" by other instructors using different learning management systems, The US Defense Department and several other organizations setting standards for information technology in education, including a 300-member consortium called IMS, published a specification called SCORM, short for Shareable Content Object Reference Model. So if you have a "SCORM-compliant LMS", that means it can play interactive learning content, like self-guided tutorials, and certain simulations. Very cool! .LRN's LORS package, authored principally by Ernie Ghiglione, is one example of a SCORM-compliant player.
Many learning experiences, however, are open-ended -- meaning it's the interaction between and among instructors and students, and other players in the learning experience (patients for example, in a medical setting, or clients in a law school moot court or business school project) that really drives the value students derive from a course. SCORM doesn't do a very good job of modeling an open-ended process, or integrating the collaborative tools that participants use online to support such experiences.
Enter IMS LD ("learning Design"). This is a more sophisticated specification that provides a pedagogically neutral language for modeling such experiences. And now OpenACS/.LRN is the first LMS to support the specification by providing a player for IMS LD-compliant content. In addition to "expressing the "base content" itself, the OpenACS/.LRN player allows integration of the many collaboration tools our platform provides into the learning experience experienced through the player.
Professor Carlos Delgado Kloos of Madrid's Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) kindly provided this link to instructions for accessing a working instance of IMS LD running as part of a .LRN instance; this documentation for administrators on using the package is also very helpful to read.
Now why should you care? Online massively-multi-player (MMP) gaming, online communities, and e-learning are all increasingly central to the worlds of education and entertainment, which themselves are inextricably intertwined, especially for younger generations. And, IMS LD represents an effort to create a lingua franca for developing content for the nexus of these three phenomena. What, concretely, do we mean? Consider, for example, how such a capability might be used in a law school. We could model the legal system, with "players" acting in different roles to advocate, adjudicate, and dispense justice, using collaboration tools like chat for lawyers to examine witnesses and present arguments, polls for juries to reach verdicts, and wikis for judges to write decisions collaboratively.
Huge, right? It's even more significant if this experience can be developed with the knowledge that it can reach a really broad audience, which is what an open specification makes possible. The hard part is keeping things simple enough that people can learn the format and develop for it, while keeping it flexible and "abstract" enough to encompass a large enough "possibility set" that people won't be tempted to fork so far for their own tweaks that they can't get back to something everyone can run. I'd expect a cottage industry will emerge in which participants will author libraries of "LD templates" of different pedagogical approaches that instructors could then easily configure for their teaching needs. Right now, though, that's a bit further ahead in the future.
So we'll see how this unfolds. See immediately below, as well as in the comments on this page for excerpts from some very helpful further comments by some colleagues in the .LRN community:
From Professor Jesus G. Boticario of the Artificial Intelligence Department of Spain's Universidad Nacional de Educacion a la Distancia (UNED):
"Let me add that I'm looking forward to reading the comments from Luis and Jopez on this. I presume that they will clarify a key issue regarding IMS-LD, which is the description, in a non-dependent pedagogical way (i.e., open to any pedagogical approach) of learning activity workflows. Moreover, this opens up a standard approach to deal with a recurrent open problem in learning, which is to take into account individual needs and preferences while interacting with learning activities. In particular, the LD designer can describe a learning activity to be delivered, using any pedagogical approach applicable (e.g., a very simple one: first provide the examples then a related explanation, or the other way around, first introduce the subject at hand then provide examples, and provide one or the other considering if the learner has an inductive or deductive learning style).
Furthermore, the fact is that the IMS-LD specification expands opportunities for re-use of learning designs by enabling interoperability among compliant learning management systems is what makes it so powerful (Buzza, Bean, Harrigan & Carey, 2004). Available at: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/articles/10.5334/2005-17/
IMHO, another relevant issue here is to remark the R&D projects which have been using IMS-LD in conjuction with dotLRN. On our side these are as follows:
- EU4ALL (October 2006-September 2010)
European Unified Approach for Assissted Lifelong Learning
Funded by the EC under the 6th FP: IST-2005-034778
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/80191_en.html
- ADAPTAPlan (January 2006-December 2008)
Adaptation based on machine learning, user modelling and planning for complex user-oriented tasks
Funded y the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology: TIN 2005-08945-C06-01
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/adaptaplan/
- FAA (February 2005 – July 2007)
Open and Accessible Training
Funded by the Xunta of Galicia (Spain): PGIDIT-05-SIN-011-E
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/faa
- aLFanet (May 2002-April 2005)
Active Learning for Adaptive Internet
Funded by the EC under the 5th FP: IST-2001-33288 to cover de full life cycle of adaptive e-learning
http://alfanet.ia.uned.es
Cheers,
Jesus"
From Professor Gustaf Neumann, Head of the Department of Information Systems at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration:
"Hi Folks,
A few comments from my side concerning IMS LD.
- first of all, i think that it is great, that we have one of the best IMS LD supports
available in .LRN
- however, we should not overemphasis it, since IMS LD has as well many weaknesses, at least for university usage with a blended learning approach:
* most teachers are not able to develop a useful IMS LD design in the time they want to devote for this
* IMS LD is designed with an "ex-ante course design" in mind, which is "re-played" in a class situation. At least in our university, this would not work, since we seldom run the exact same design multiple times. It looks to me, as if the mindset behind IMS LD is that the course designer is typically not the teacher in a class.
* The suitability of IMS LD might be much better for highly standardized courses such as for driving licenses, ecdl, etc. or for university targeting on distance education.
- in our environment agile content development and flexible content reuse together with some learning-activity management (similar to ad-hoc work flows) are much more important. Teachers want to react immediately to pot. weaknesses in their materials and course designs...
Interesting enough, the community base approach of .LRN makes it easy to define online learning communities,which are suitable for both, distant and blended learning. So I would recommend emphasizing this aspect as well sufficiently.
best regards
-gustaf
From Jose Pablo Escobedo Del Cid at UC3M:
"Hi, Jesus,
You are right about the pedagogical issue. The IMS-LD specification provides a generic and flexible language to capture the pedagogic structure of an online learning experience and it is designed to enable many different pedagogics to be expressed. (More info on how to model different didactical scenarios can be found here: Daniel Burgos, Rob Koper, 2005, "Practical pedagogical uses of IMS Learning Design's Level B http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/471) ". IMHO, the flexibility of the IMS-LD spec, not being bound to any pedagogy, is one of its major advantages. The levels B and C (which introduce the conditions, properties and notifications) enable the automation of learning flow activities, which are triggered by the completion of tasks and the value of the properties that change during the run, rather than the learning flows being pre-planned by the course designer. A consequence of this dependence on runtime events is that the activities set to learners are no longer wholly predictable, they depend on the course of the collaboration.
I hope this helps!
Regards,
Jopez"
Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Gustaf Neumann 07 Jun 2017, at 09:28 AM
.LRN 2007 Board of Directors
After the nomination process, the current elected board:
(1 year term: 1/nov/2006 - 31/oct/2007)
- Jesus G. Boticario (UNED)
- Carl Robert Blesius (HMS)
- Rocael Hernandez (Galileo University)
- Caroline Meeks (Solution Grove)
- Carlos Delgado (UC3M)
- Cesar Brea (Monitor)
- Gustaf Neumann (WU Wien)
Check the dotLRN governance.
Contact the board: board @t dotlrn dot org.
Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Caroline Meeks 16 Aug 2016, at 11:37 AM
.LRN Consortium: Membership Benefits
.LRN is, and aspires to continue to be, a serious platform for major organizations to commit to and build on, not simply a hobbyist project as many other more loosely-governed and managed efforts are. To this end, the health of the project depends on the coordination of its development and promotion. Even the legal existence of the consortium contributes to both of these things, by facilitating contracting and by signaling the seriousness of our enterprise. Members who contribute to funding these common efforts get a voice and a vote in where we go and how we get there. Specifically, members are eligible to serve on our Board of Directors and its various Committees. Members are entitled to private notice and consultation about major matters affecting the project before broader decisions and policies are announced.
Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini 22 Sep 2009, at 05:40 PM
DOCUMENT STATUS: A draft that HAS NOT YET been endorsed by the OpenACS OCT, the .LRN Board, or the .LRN Leadership Team (Honchos)
These areas and list of activities has been summarized of a discussion over the lists. The aim is to have a more integrated set of activities created and provided by the different working groups (board, leadership team, oct).
Consortium investment in .LRN:
- Create a budget for the next 12 months / year, has to include also all administrative costs. (Alvaro can prepare a preliminary budget).
- Figure out the priorities for technical development (QA, new releases, etc.), documentation & tutorials, marketing.
Some areas to invest in that have been already formulated:
- Bug-fixes: #3 & #4: prioritize technical tasks is OCT and leadership authority
- QA testing for releases
- Release Management
- See original proposed set of jobs: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUeGYMa72ygGZGhjbnc0bm1fN2R3czdxeGZ0&hl=en
Documentation:
- Tutorials for basic areas of openacs technical development.
- Update on installation process for official documentation (already on creation process, a plan about how to address it will be posted soon, so approval is give to proceed with it)
Marketing:
- Training on .LRN usage.
- Users help section
- A demo-course of .LRN (already on creation process)
- All these actions (and probably new ones) towards getting more users.
The Consortium investment process:
- The priorities has to be agreed at the Leadership Team / OCT. Any formulated item will require a description clear enough to be able to justify a given investment.
- Figure out which investment channels we can have:
-
- There is the initial Jobs small - incentives.
- Some other people argue for better rates, that can lead us to monthly contract: directly contract monthly time in a yearly basis for some developers (at lets say open source rates, not as small as in the jobs): for instance one or two experienced community recognized developers, and one newbie (which is not expensive) that will do the bee-work.
- Other possible paths? such as posting for a job and people make an offer and from there negotiate a give amount. Different people might require different amounts.
- We might contract either an individual or an organization (Institution or a company)
- Assign a given priority / task to the interested developer / party.
- OCT / Leadership Team review and approved the work finished
- Consortium pays.
Oracle support:
At this point we cannot guarantee oracle support for .LRN.
There are specific donations to Oracle, such from UCLA.
Additionally, UNED & Bergen use oracle and has given their donation, so a part of that funds should go to Oracle support.
Also, since UNED has an active group of developers supporting their installation, we should ask them to test Oracle as well.
Increase community participation:
- Consortium will request active and committed technical developer participation in the Leadership Team to the institutions that might have technical developers. (nominate an active developer for open-source with lets say 10-20 hours a week). Additionally, to be able to contribute better the best scenario will be to have this institutions to have their .LRN installations up-to-date, and have mechanisms that allow them to separate their code from what the official distribution is, that as well will let them influence more directly into the official distribution.
- Improve communication from OCT & Leadership Team:
- post the meeting minutes in time (the day after at the latest)
- get the IRC logger back and have a usable page to access logs
- move technical discussion to forums
- Improve communication with the board.
- Others?
Community growth:
- Create means to get new developers: any ideas?
- Emma: That won't happen alone. The main issue is "getting new users" and
it's a marketing matter.
dotlrn.org:
- git will be replaced with cvs checkout from the cvs.openacs.org
- update content
- The technical management is assigned to the Leadership Team.
- Leadership team can assume the technical management BUT ONLY ONCE the
site is a CVS checkout from the openacs.org tree
The new tutorial:
- Has to have a place, where it links and download it.
- It can be included on the distribution file and in the documentation.
- With which tool we'll produce future tutorials and based on which templates still need to be settled. Maybe a comparison chart will help to make the decision.
- A tutorial has not the same format and purpose of a traditional documentation (format as how is structured, organized and designed, and not to which is the document type).
- Has to reflect any engineering standard that it might come across within its examples. While understanding that the tutorial is not to explain the engineering standards. The engineering standards has to be clearly defined with examples if necessary in the engineering standards section of the standard documentation (including the accessibility ones). The better explained, the easier to follow them!
- It can be exported to different formats but its mandatory format is html.
- As for documentation: we see in the repository no major changes in the documentation itself over the last years, so probably we need good review and really involve people to update on it, since none of the members of the groups seems to be doing maintenance over them.
Created by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini, last modified by Caroline Meeks 23 Mar 2007, at 01:34 AM
Consortium Members (2007)
Representative / Organization
- Janine Sisk, Furfly LLC *
- Malte Sussdorff, Cognovís GmbH & Co. KG *
- Erik Valevatn, University of Bergen *
- Carl Robert Blesius, Mass General Hospital *
- Caroline Meeks, SolutionGrove *
- Rafael Pastor Vargas, CInDeTec, UNED *
- Cyrano Ruiz, Universidad Galileo
- Dario Roig, Universidad de Valencia *
- Alfred Essa, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities *
- Vivian Aguilar, Viaro Networks *
- Gustaf Neumann, Vienna University *
- Carlos Delgado Kloos, UC3M *
- Tracy Adams, ACSPropel *
- Giancarlo Luxardo, SII *
- Mark, pumptheory.com *
- Gregory Hancock, University of Sydney *
- Fernando Albuquerque, Tekne Digital *
- Uiri Sapaio, YABT.
- Pablo Arozarena, Telefonica I+D, Spain.
- Rob Ross, Museum of Science Boston
* initial request for invoice sent
** invoice sent
No reply from them yet.
