ASPECT Summer School in Lisbon
During the ASPECT project’s Summer School on 8 May in Estoril (Portugal) over 40 teachers from Belgium, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania came together to discuss the use of online learning resources and learning content repositories in mathematics and science lessons. The aim of this Summer School was particularly to explore how learning content standards (such as SCORM and Common Cartridge) can be exploited by teachers and how different types of “content packaging” can add value to the learning experience.
Read the full news item from the ASPECT Summer School at the Xplora website in English, French or German.
Read here some quotes from the teachers and national coordinators who took part in the Summer School:
Pascal Craye, teacher coordinator, KlasCement, Belgium
"You can gain a lot of time as a result of standardisation. You can reuse resources easily, but it will take some time to convince teachers."
José Moura Carvalho, teacher working for the Ministry of Education, Portugal
"In Portugal it's a usual situation that teachers create many resources themselves but they are not used to sharing them.
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If the Ministry of Education accepts the standardisation used, for example in the LRE portal, there will be more interoperability in resources and repositories.
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I think it’s the role of the Ministry of Education to tell teachers how to use standards. But, as we don’t use SCORM or Common Cartridge, for example, I think it’s more useful from the point of view of the Ministry to know about these standards and specifications rather than teachers themselves. Teachers tend to use software to make their own resources but usually do not create SCORM packages. So I don’t think we need to make them understand what a SCORM package is, plus it’s a bit difficult and too technical for most teachers, in my opinion."
Miguela Fernandes, ICT teacher, Portugal
"Probably yes, teachers should know about content standards, but they should know a lot of things beforehand! I think this a bit difficult for the average teacher. It’s probably difficult to understand the standards, formats and how things work. It could be a step-by-step process.
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If we want students to study independently, you can give them a SCORM package that they unzip and then use. But if you want, for example, to integrate a package in Moodle, because in Portugal we use Moodle a lot, probably Common Cartridge is good, because we can prepare everything and import it into Moodle."
Norbertas Airošius, ICT teacher, Lithuania
"I was familiar with SCORM before but today I discovered also Common Cartridge and for me it is more useful. Usually you need to delete things, find new activities to add or modify the course and when you use Common Cartridge you can do it easily."
Ivan De Winne, mathematics teacher, Belgium
"Using Moodle with Common Cartridge is really an advantage. I tried it this afternoon and I was really amazed that all the resources appeared in the way I wanted in Moodle. What is important is that I could also change them afterwards - not only changing the title but the text and so on. It is easier to use a resource with your students if you can rearrange the original package you have downloaded and installed in Moodle. Common Cartridge is very useful for that I think."
Hélder, biology teacher, Portugal
"I went to the ASPECT portal, I picked the SCORM version of the file I wanted to use and I imported it to my computer. Then I uploaded it to Moodle and that's it. It's simple and the format was the same as the original file."
Delia Oprea, Siveco, Romania (ASPECT content provider)
"All our content is packed with SCORM and in the future we might have double packaging including also Common Cartridge. I see only advantages in using content standards."
More news about the Summer School will follow!
