Expected Results

ASPECT will take steps to address the potentially damaging ‘disconnect’ between standards bodies and experts on the one hand and educational policy makers, ICT advisers and practitioners on the other. It will ensure that best practice with regard to the implementation of standards and specifications for learning technologies (SSLT) will no longer be derived primarily via technical experts working on pilots and demonstrators and meeting together in workshops and plugfests.

By the end of the project, ASPECT will be actively working with at least 200 leading European experts, professionals and policy makers in Ministries of Education who can make a real impact on SSLT take-up. From the perspective of Ministries of Education taking part in project, a key result will be that teachers’ views as well as those of technical experts will have been considered during the pre-standardisation process.

In addition ASPECT partners will continue to be active contributors to all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL). The project will also specifically:

• Help create at least two CEN Workshop Agreements (subject to approval by CEN/ISSS WSLT), one IMS specification (subject to approval by the IMS Global Learning Consortium) and two ENs created in TC353.
  
  
• Make proposals and recommendations concerning how a number of standards can be combined in order to ensure more transparent forms of interoperability between learning content repositories and the wide variety of learning platforms in schools.
  
  
• Enable stakeholders to better understand the merits of a range of different standards and specifications and how these can be applied to both professionally generated content and the growing volume of user-generated content from teachers and pupils.
  
  
• Provide a new set of support services that will facilitate the interoperability of learning content. Implemented within an ASPECT Service Centre (ASC). These will start to become available in September 2009 and will be sustained beyond the end of the project. The ASC will include a:
  
  
• LOR registry
  
  
• Vocabulary Bank for Education
  
  
• Application Profile registry
  
  
• Automatic Translation service for Learning Object Metadata and content packaging formats
  
  
• Compliance testing
  
  
• Transformer service, transforming metadata and vocabularies into another format
  
  
• Access to known interoperability issues
  
  
• Consolidation and further extend work that has already commenced related to the building of a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange service for schools.
  
  
• Carry out a wide range of dissemination activities (including 20 public events, publication of five newsletters and an ASPECT Award) in order to create a sustainable framework within which stakeholders (at least 300 participants) can work together.