GITTA is a collaborative initiative between 10 Swiss academic institutions that developed open educational content in geoinformatics between 2001-2008. The goals were to pool Swiss knowledge in this field into a shared learning pool, replace lectures with hybrid teaching, and integrate the content into university curricula. Over 40 lessons were created at basic and intermediate levels, along with case studies. The content was made publicly available in 2006 under an open license to benefit all partners. The project utilized XML and the eLML framework to implement the didactic concept and make the content technically accessible.

1. GITTA – Geographic Information Technology Training Alliance
http://www.gitta.info/website/en/html_reg/index.html
Description:
In the context of the Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project GITTA (Geographic Information Technology
Training Alliance), between July 2001 and July 2008 ten Swiss partner institutions developed and
operated learning content for academic education in the field of geoinformatics. The partners are
interdisciplinary institutions, different types of academies (universities, technical universities,
colleges) as well as multilingual. The summarized goal of GITTA is:
• Bundling Swiss knowledge in the field of Geographic Information Science and Technology
(GIST), integrating it into a virtual educational pool which is flexibly utilizable for several
disciplines
• Replacing ex-cathedra teaching by hybrid teaching arrangements
• Integrating the contents into the partner institutions’ curricula
At this point the project contains more than 40 lessons, spread to the two levels “basic” and
“intermediate”. Additionally, solution-oriented case studies were generated. Following the concept
of a self-learning, self-adjusting organization, early 2006 the content was made available to the
interested public in line with an Open Content strategy. October 2006 the Society of Friends of GITTA
was founded, amongst others with the intention to maintain and improve the content that was
developed for the project.
For technical realization the XML framework eLML (eLesson Markup Language) was used, which
implements the structure of the didactic concept. It is available as Open Source Product at
SourceForge.net.
Type:
This is an example of an alliance for content creation which would not have been ossible alone. The
alliance character allowed the participating institutions to pool their resources and develop high
quality learning units in a very complicated, high risk sector with multimedia animations. The
material has been developed under the creative common license to make it beneficial for all partners
– and others.
Collaborative open educational development initiative.
The project also contains learning units which are based on a ceratin paradigm of self-study.
Features:
Complete units and case studies, XML (eLML) usage.