Building on Best Practices
OpeningupSlovenia is building its starting position on the following achievements:
Multimedia sector: Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the Jožef Stefan Institute is running the services of VideoLectures.Net[1], a global web portal and digital archive for high-definition academic videos, which has been awarded and recognized in 2013 by the United Nations and UNESCO as the most outstanding example of creative and innovative e-Content in the world in the last decade. VideoLectures.Net is run at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and is currently expanding its vision and strategy in collaboration with the Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd based in London (UK). It is also a case study in two FP7 research projects transLectures[2] and MediaMixer[3]. It so far represents the only technically feasible, free and open archive for testing the creation of open learning environments and mass usage of OERs. Therefore, it qualifies as a best-practice premium example of a European based OER video library.
Educational sector: Slovenian Education Network[4] is the Ministry founded centralised main educational portal. It was launched in 1996 and includes a catalogue of educational materials, e-communities for teachers (Moodle), virtual classrooms for classes, web sites, events, institutions. The portal is completely open and does not require a login for any type of use. There are around 9.000 daily users. Additionally, first developed projects with free e-material have been running since 1997, and for 2006 – 2015 10 million Euros have been invested to increase the provision of educational multimedial and interactive e-materials on the portal. These materials are available for use under a Creative Commons license. The government is currently running e-textbook pilots (3,5 million Euros) with more than 20 new e-textbooks planned by the end of 2014 and even more in 2015. There are centrally recommended assessments of digital competences for teachers (e-competent teacher standard, also for headmasters) in primary and secondary schools[5].
Research sector: Referring to the research being done at the Artificial Intelligence laboratory with software tools for multimodal data analysis that could be applied to education in general. Among others: Text-Garden, a suite of text mining tools[6]; OntoGen, a tool for ontology learning; Document-Atlas, a tool for complex visualization; AnswerArt, a system for semantic search on large databases; Enrycher, a system for semantic enrichment of textual data; SearchPoint, a portal for visual and contextualized Web browsing; Contextify a tool for contextualized e-mail and contact management.
Industrial sector: Business, which main revenue is not in education has realised the potential that lies in life-long learning education and in the opportunities that open education can provide if correctly designed, applied and deployed. In addition, the Ministry has been working with the industry in public tenders for the purchase of equipment, the business sector participated in research projects for development and preparation of multimedia and interactive e-content for schools. Above all, a good example of public-private partnership large-scale project was “e- Education”, where each partner was to develop and implement activities for which they had an interest, namely 1) Public institutions (National Education Institute and others), schools and non-profit institutions, along with research institutions to develop standard e-competencies for teachers, where they have prepared a program of seminars and training, counselling sessions for schools and trained lecturers and consultants and 2) The private sector with its experience has been managing the project and has been responsible for spreading of seminars and consultations with lecturers and consultants, which cannot be expected by the public sector as it doesn’t have market income.
Major corporations such as Microsoft, Cisco and more, offered development funds and invested in improving the education sector directly and in coordination with the Ministry of Education. A small proportion of European funds was used for these activities.
[1] VideoLectures.Net website: http://www.videolectures.net
[2] transLectures FP7 ICT Project – STREP, FP7-ICT-2011-7 – Language technologies – website : http://translectures.eu/
[3] MediaMixer FP7 ICT Project – CA, FP7-ICT-2011-8 – Intelligent Information Management website : http://mediamixer.eu/
[4] SIO , www.sio.si
[5] http://www.sio.si/fileadmin/dokumenti/bilteni/E-solstvo_BILTEN_ANG_2012_screen.pdf
[6] All tools listed at http://ailab.ijs.si/tools/
