A ppt: "learning portals in practice", explaining the "Organic-Edunet" open repository of educational resources on organic agriculture and agroecology, presented at the e-learning Africa Congress, Tanzania 2011.

1. Learning Portals in practice:
The case of the Organic.Edunet Web portal.
Hatzakis Ilias,
Project Manager, GRNET
e-mail: hatzakis@grnet.gr

2. • The general idea of open learning networks of
digital educational repositories and the
impact to all educational levels
• The case of the ORGANIC EDUNET project
• A learning portal in practice: Practical issues
for the targeted communities

3. Fundamental principles
The Universal Library – Public Agora
– A contribution to democracy open access movement
– A human right Open access
Open source
– A fair return to the tax payer Open data
OER
– Access to original data
– A means to improve the knowledge
changing knowledge ecosystem/ new chaotic data production/
roles/ profitable value added services gigantic data volume

4. learning object
"any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be
used for learning, education or training"
ΙΕΕΕ Learning Technology Standards Committee (2002)

5. learning object
"any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be
used for learning, education or training“
+ metadata describing this use

6. metadata
Author Subject
ID Title
Publisher
Date Catalog

7. educational metadata

8. definitions
• digital repository: system for the storage,
location and retrieval of digital resources
• digital learning repository (DLR):
– nature of resources or their description
reflects an interest of use in an educational
context
Holden C., “From Local Challenges to a Global Community: Learning
Repositories Summit”, Academic ADL Co-Lab, 2003

9. networks of repositories
• learning repository federations
– interconnecting learning
repositories
– facilitate metadata exchange
– allow searching throughout whole
network

10. required:
networked learning
repositories
problem to solve:
metadata polymorphy

12. • Achieves interoperability between the digital collections
of Organic Agriculture and Agroecology content that
producers in various countries have developed,
• Facilitates publication, access, and use of this content in
multilingual learning contexts through a single reference
point (the Web portal).

13. rationale
 irreversible damage done to the environment by current
agricultural practices
 soil and water pollution
 depletion of natural resources
 destruction of delicate ecosystems
 Organic Agriculture (OA) & Agroecology (AE) as
alternative approaches
 safer agricultural & food products
 environmentally sound production
“…need for actions supporting the training and education of all
stakeholders related to OA…”
EU Action Plan for Organic Food & Farming, 2004
13/56

14. need
 systematic collection and
categorisation of learning resources
related to OA and AE
 integrating online environment
 increase use and reuse
 study & assessment of usage scenarios
 in the context of formal educational
programs
14/56

15. Objectives
1. support stakeholders producing content about OA & AE
– describe according to multilingual, standard-complying metadata
– publish in online federation of learning repositories
2. deploy a multilingual online environment on top of the online federation of
repositories
– to facilitate end-users’ search, retrieval, access and use of learning resources
3. study educational scenarios to support the teaching of OA & AE relevant topics
– use Organic.Edunet Web portal to find learning resources in the repositories
4. involve various schools & universities to evaluate project results
– focused pilot trials within Organic.Edunet partner institutions
– open validation events within Organic.Edunet affiliated institutions and dynamic users
5. create organisational structures to support the sustainability of project results
– reinforce the cooperation of stakeholders in the OA & AE content area
http://www.organic-edunet.eu 15/56

16. targeted users
 tomorrow’s consumers: highschool
children
 to be familiarized with concepts &
benefits of OA & AE
 tomorrow’s professionals: students of
agricultural universities
 to be educated about methods and
practices of OA & AE
16/56

17. THE PORTAL
• Organic.Edunet Web portal
http://www.organic-edunet.eu
• Provides access to 11,000 digital learning
resources from 11 digital repositories
(more to come soon!)

18. WHAT’s IN THERE?
• High quality multimedia/ multilingual training
content on OA, AE, certified by the community
• WHO?
– FAO
– Norwegian University of Life Sciences
– European Network of Organic Agriculture Teachers (ENOAT)
– University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Bucharest
– Corvinus University of Budapest (BCE) and the Association for Hungarian Organic Farming (MOGERT).
– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Agricultural University of Athens
– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Estonian University of Life Sciences
– Organic Agriculture & Agroecology from the Bundesministerium fur Land- Austria
– Sociedad Espanola de Agricultura Ecologica (SEAE) and the Centro di Investigacion y Formacion de
Agricultura Ecologica y Desarrolo Rural (CIFAED), Spain
• AFFILIATE PARTNERS (82)
• Open/ new collections:
– The “slow food” movement
– WWF

19. Home Page
Language selection
Main menu
Browse resources
Shortcut to semantic
search
Shortcut to text based
Login to your account search
Create a new account
or manage access
problems
Review portal’s stats
Organic.Edunet Web
portal satisfaction
survey

20. Home Page
Main links about
guidelines on finding
and contributing
resources
Short presentation of
the featured resource,
dynamically selected
Links to most
recent/popular/viewed
resources
Panel for social
activities
(rating/reviewing
history)

21. available learning resources
http://www.organic-edunet.eu 21/67

22. Organic.Edunet portal stats*
 2200 registered users
 almost 11.000 available resources
 11 institutional collections so far
 More than 44.000 visits *01/01/2010 -15/05/2011
 182.300 page views
 ≈11.000/month , >360 per day
 almost 34.000 unique visitors
 75% new visitors / 27% direct traffic

30. educational scenarios
available through the
portal

31. educational aim
 tested & revised handbooks for
teachers on organic scenarios
 introducing OA & AE topics in
curriculum
 design of learning activities using
content
 process for adaptation of existing
scenarios/content in other countries &
contexts

32. university scenario (3/3)

33. school scenario (3/3)

34. pedagogy
• handbook for scenario implementation
at school level
http://confolio.vm.grnet.gr/scam/6/resource/285
• handbook for scenario implementation
at university level
http://oe.confolio.org/scam/34/resource/296

35. How to contribute resources?
Individual users contribute through participation in one of the user communities that have been taken under the umbrella of
Organic.Edunet. These communities use the Organic.Edunet Repository Tool in order to set up their working space in their own
language, upload and share their resources with their peers, and connect this working space with the Organic.Edunet federation.
Examples of existing user communities are the Greek Rural Schools’ Community (that connects teachers from Greek rural
schools that are interested in using the school’s organic garden as a teaching/learning aid) and the AGROASIS Community (that
connects university teachers of Organic Agriculture that are located in Nordic countries). In order for the community’s
educational resources to be made available through the Organic.Edunet portal, the community needs to adopt and follow some
minimum Quality Assurance procedure. Here you can find more information on how to join an existing community or create a
new one.
Organisations or initiatives contribute through the connection (federation) of their institutional collections with the rest of the
Organic.Edunet ones. These collections may either use the Organic.Edunet Repository Tool to set up a learning repository and
organize their resources, or can use their own repository/database systems and make their metadata available through the Open
Access Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Examples of existing institutional collections that are connected
to Organic.Edunet are the ones of the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) and of the ECOLOGICA Association. In order for an
institution to make its collection of resources available through the Organic.Edunet portal, they should follow a publicly
available Quality Assurance procedure that is compliant to the Organic.Edunet requirements. Here you can find more
information on how to connect an institutional collection.

36. How to connect yours
There are two different ways of integrating new repositories into the Organic.Edunet federation.
• If the institution interested in integrating its repository already has an existing repository with
support for OAI-PMH (with support for IEEE LOM format) AND the learning resources stored in it
have an Application Profile equivalent to the one set up in Organic.Edunet, THEN there is only one
step: Write an email to Web Portal responsible person (info [at] organicedunet [dot] eu) to agree on
the parameters of the harvesting process:
– URL
– Port
– Set
– Date interval
• If the institution repository does not support OAI-PMH OR the Application Profile is not equivalent
to the one installed in Organic.Edunet, THEN it is mandatory the installation of the confolio tool.
After the installation of confolio, write an email to Web Portal responsible person (info [at]
organicedunet [dot] eu) to agree on the parameters of the harvesting process:
– URL
– Port
– Set
– Date interval

40. Thank you 
Hatzakis Ilias,
Project Manager, GRNET
e-mail: hatzakis@grnet.gr