講演要旨 (Abstracts of the Presentation)
第1部「学習コンテンツ共有再利用の国際連携: GLOBEの貢献」
Part 1: International Collaboration for Sharing and Reuse of Quality Learning Resources: Contributions of GLOBE
GLOBEの9年: 背景と系譜
9 years of GLOBE: Reflections
- Tsuneo Yamada, Professor, Center of ICT and Distance Education (CODE), the Open University of Japan (OUJ), Japan
- Gerard L. Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT and Senior Director for Academic Technology Services, California State University System
Abstracts
Almost 9 years passed since the founder organizations recognized each other. At the beginning of the event, we reflect the 9 years’ activities in GLOBE framework and summarize the outcomes and the issues remained.
Quality for Reuse, towards a methodology for learning object repositories
- Gilbert Paquette, Director, LORNET Canadian research network & Director of the CICE Research Chair, LICEF Research Center, Télé-université, Quebec, Canada
- Frédéric Bergeron, Senior Analyst, LICEF Research Center, Télé-université, Quebec, Canada
Abstracts
The Quality for Reuse project (www.q4r.org), led by Télé-université du Québec, has achieved a collaboration between some GLOBE members and other LOR operators in order to build from best practices a methodology to design, implement and maintain a learning object repository. The methodology proposes a multi-actor process to foster quality assurance practices.
GLOBEの現在: テクノロジ、サービス、統計
GLOBE Now: Technologies, Services and Statistics
- Frans Van Assche, Secretary General, GLOBE
- Erik Duval, Professor, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Abstracts
The present state of the organization will be introduced: The evidences and statistics on the member organizations, metadata collections, search technologies and technical standards, new-value added services and so on, will be shown.
第2部 特別セッション「公開教育資源とGLOBE: アジア・アフリカ諸国の視点」
Part 2: Special Session: OER and GLOBE: African and Asian Perspectives
招待講演: アジアにおける公開教育資源(OER): スナップショット
[Invited Speech] OER in ASIA: A Snapshot
- Gajaraj Dhanarajan Ph.D, Tan Sri Dato’ Emeritus Professor, Wawasan Open University, Malaysia
Abstracts
This report is on a study that the Wawasan Open University, Penang, Malaysia, carried out with a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Canada [ IDRC, www.idrc.org ]. IDRC has long been interested in and gave support to research relating to open access through a programme called PANdora [Pan - Asia Network Distance Open Research Access]. PanDora is a network of research scholars committed to promoting research projects in the developing countries of Asia. One such project is a study of The Current State of Play in the Use of Open Educational Resources in the Asian Region.
This study has been ongoing since 2010 and involves co operation of some 10 scholars in the region. The purpose of the study was to get a measure of the digital infrastructures and knowledge as well as practice of using Open Educational Resources in the region. The report that is being presented at the meeting is a set of preliminary data that has been gathered and which is being currently analyzed.
e-LearningとOERはアフリカの高等教育をいかに変革するか
How e-Learning and OER Can Transform Higher Education in Africa
- Neil David Loftus Butcher, OER Africa, South Africa
Abstracts
This presentation reviews the concept of Open Education Resources, describing their particular relevance – in a rapidly evolving technological context – in African higher education systems. It focuses on describing a series of varied case studies of OER development and use in Africa, in an effort to illustrate key ways in which OER is having a transformative effect on educational programmes in some African universities. It concludes by reflecting on the implications of these case studies for higher education in all parts of the world.
イスラエルにおける公開学習資源(OER)
MAOR – Meta-data And Object Repository
- Eli Shmueli, director, MEITAL, the Israeli Inter-University Centre for e-Learning (IUCEL)
Abstracts
MEITAL is the Israeli Inter-University Centre for e-Learning (IUCEL), which is part of the Israeli Inter-University Computation Centre (IUCC). MEITAL creates opportunities for institutional connections and collaboration among academic institutes in Israel, and supports national conferences and seminars, central platforms (asynchronous and synchronous) for experiencing learning technologies, a research fund, centralized purchase of products, and more.
One of MEITAL’s activities is MAOR project – Meta-data and Object Repository – the Israeli repository of online learning object meta-data. MAOR’s goals are to assist locating online educational resources that have undergone review, and utilize them for learning. The repository represents a step towards an innovative, wider perception of learning object repositories suited to the overflow of information in the Web 2.0 age, and in which the public is involved in the processes of creation, evaluation and distribution of learning materials by offering interoperability between learning materials in repositories both Israeli and worldwide, as well as granting access to accessible, high quality learning materials for the learning and teaching public. Use of the repository is freely available to educational institutes, public bodies, teachers, educators and the general public, and enables all of the above to share learning resources simply, efficiently and cooperatively. The connection between MAOR and MERLOT databases, search engines and other tools and mechanisms supports different audiences in many languages, and in different locations.
アラブ諸国における公開学習資源(OER)
Unlocking Learning Resources Residing in Institutions’ Learning Management Systems
- Jad Najjar, Assistant Professor, AL-Quds University (Jerusalem, Palestine) and the managing director of Eummena organization (Leuven, Belgium)
Abstracts
In the last decade, the challenge was to, first, put open educational resources (OERs) in online repositories, then connecting the repositories worldwide. In the Arab world, to our knowledge, only limited initiatives started in recent years to publish OERs based on standards. Much less effort was put in connecting local collections to international repositories. This is related to several reasons, to list a few: no dedicated financial support in form of research projects, copyright issues, low availability of Arabic content in existing international repositories.
Eummena is a young non-profit organization, an associate member of Ariadne foundation, was established in 2011 to target OER research in the Arab World. In collaboration between AL-Quds University (member of Globe) and Eummena, an initiative has started recently to encourage universities in the Arab world and worldwide to use and contribute OERs to international repositories and to locally interconnect the repositories. Based on the fact that teachers and learners live in learning management systems cloud, we decided to offer them the OER finding and indexing services in the learning management systems. Our approach is to develop widgets and modules that enable teachers and learners to access and publish OERs from within learning management systems like Moodle. As far as user interaction is concerned, the modules and widgets should track user activities and store relevant usage data in central repositories so it is used, via particular web services, for recommending teachers and learners relevant OERs based on their previous interaction with the learning management systems and OERs.
We believe our approach and applications will, on one hand, increase the access to repositories like Globe and Ariadne. On the other hand, it will encourage teachers to contribute their resources to the repository.
第3部「日本における学術・学習コンテンツの開発・流通・出版」
Part 3: Development, Distributions and e-Publsihing of Academic/Educational Learning Content in Japan
わが国の高等教育コンテンツ分野における共有再利用流通支援の枠組: NIME, OUJ-CODE and AXIES-csd
The Japanese frameworks to support sharing/reuse/distribution of digital HE content: NIME, OUJ-CODE and AXIES-csd
- 山田 恒夫 (放送大学 ICT活用・遠隔教育センター・教授) / Tsuneo Yamada, Professor, Center of ICT and Distance Education (CODE), the Open University of Japan (OUJ), Japan
Abstracts
In March 2005, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) launched "NIME-glad (Gateway to Learning for Ability Development)", a cross-institutional search system specialized in the educational content which HE/TE/LLL sectors delivered via the Internet. The number of the registered metadata was 46,222 (as of May, 2008, e-learning courses 10,322; open courseware 3,313; open lectures/seminars 662, materials 31,925; the maximum number is unknown because it had been already closed). "NIME-glad" shared the roles in the field with NICER operated by NIER. When NIME planned and constructed initially "NIME-glad" portal, many Japanese HE/TE/LLL institutions had neither institutional repositories nor content management systems in which they could store their own educational/learning content. In addition, many institutions and faculties were reluctant to manage them with metadata by themselves. So, domestically, NIME had no federation of the repositories and tagged metadata to the learning content and accumulated them at NIME referatory in a simple "aggregation" way. On the other hand, under the collaborations with international consortia, NIME-glad realized a global search system internationally by using "federated search" and "harvesting" technologies. At the abolishment of NIME on March 2009, while a part of the functions was succeeded by GLOSS(Global Learning Object Search System,http://gloss.code.ouj.ac.jp/)operated by OUJ-CODE, it could not maintain any large-scale metadata collecting system except the limited cases, such as OUJ and JOCW content. At the moment, only NII project (Institutional Repositories Program、National Institute of Informatics, NII-IRP, http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en) has such large-scale functions (introduced by Prof. Yamaji at the next session).
NIME’s abolishment in the midst of Japanese administrative reforms means HE reform policies is changing from the top-down fashion by the government to the autonomous and sustainable ways in HE institutions. While, with the abolishment, there are no national center for HE reform by ICT implementation in our country, ICT use has been recognized more seriously as a fundamental catalyst for HE reform in the world. Under the limited financial and human resources, many Japanese HE/TE/LLL institutions have been looking for the effective and efficient solutions for that. One of the standpoints for the solutions they found is the collaboration among institutions. Under the backgrounds and contexts, AXIES was established in December 2011 and the working group for Academic/Educational Content Sharing and Distribution (AXIES-csd) has the missions to exchange experiences and ideas beyond the standpoints, such as academic vs. educational content, open vs. proprietary content, or library vs. instructional design services, at which both public/non-profits sectors and corporates collaborate to share the issues and solutions for new educational services and businesses and to bring new HE paradigm shift and innovations.
As an open university, OUJ has a common philosophy and concept for "Openness" and has contributed to several OER movements, and now, we are investigating the new OER concepts, such as "Open materials repository" for the development. As a distance university, OUJ uses digital terrestrial and BS broadcasting, printed materials and the Internet as delivery media. However, we also recognize smart-media will be a dominant learning platform in the near future, and we should prepare for both the effective content authoring/management/publishing infrastructure and the support team for the faculty in developing cross-media content integratively. In addition, learning spaces and processes of lifelong learners will be personalized and we should customize the content in each learner’s context in steads of "one-size-fits-all" approach. We expect the emergence of the new digital marketplace in which both open and proprietary materials in various granularities can be shared, exchanged or distributed and in which we can outsource our burdens to the new value-added services providers.
独立行政法人メディア教育開発センター(NIME)は、2005年3月、NIME-glad(「能力開発学習ゲートウェイ」)という名称で、大学等がインターネットで配信する教育用コンテンツを総合的に検索できるシステムの運用を開始した。登録メタデータ数は、e-Learningコース10,322件、オープンコースウェア3,313件、公開講座・公開講演会の記録662件、素材31,925件、計46,222件を数え(2008年5月現在、すでに運用を休止しているためピーク時の値は不明)、国立教育政策研究所のNICERとともに、教育コンテンツに関する情報ポータルサービスの一翼を担った。NIME-gladは、国内的にはリポジトリ連携の仕組みはもたず、コンテンツの権利者に代わり、NIMEや国内外の大学等が公開しているコンテンツに、IEEE-LOM version1.0に準拠したメタデータを付与し、それを単純に自身のメタデータデータベースに蓄積する単純蓄積モデルの形式をとった。一方、対外的には国際コンソーシアムとの連携において、連合リポジトリ(federated repository)を実現し、連合検索(federated search)やハーべスティング(harvesting)などの技術と標準を利用して国際的な横断検索機能を実現した。2009年3月NIMEの廃止とともに、その一部の機能は放送大学ICT活用・遠隔教育センター(CODE)のグローバル横断検索システムGLOSS(Global Learning Object Search System、http://gloss.code.ouj.ac.jp/)に継承されたが、限られたケース(例えば、放送大学や日本オープンコースウエアコンソーシアムJOCW)を除き、すでにメタデータを大規模に作成、収集する手段をもたない。現在、国内でその機能を有するのは国立情報学研究所(NII)の事業だけである(学術機関リポジトリ構築連携支援事業、Institutional Repositories Program、NII-IRP、 http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en)。
行財政改革のなかでNIMEが廃止されたことは、高等教育政策が、官主導の改革から民(大学)の自律的・持続的な改善に転換された1つのあらわれと見ることができる。NIMEの廃止によって、ICT活用による教育改革のナショナルセンターは消滅したが、国際的な潮流のなかでその重要性はむしろ増大している。こうした状況において各高等教育機関は、限られた財政的・人的資源の下でその目標を実現することがせまられており、その1つの解決策として大学間連携の必要性が増している。こうしたなかで、2011年12月発足した、大学ICT推進協議会(AXIES)では、その学術・教育コンテンツ共有流通部会において、大学内にあっては学術・教育コンテンツの垣根をこえたリポジトリの連携、大学外にあっては、オープン・有償コンテンツの垣根をこえた共有再利用・流通・出版について、産学でビジョンを共有し解決に向けて協働することになった。
放送大学(OUJ)は公開性(Openness)の理念を有する大学としてOER運動に賛同し、これまでも放送大OCWを公開するほか、JOCW横断検索サービスを提供してきたが、教育素材リポジトリなど新たなOERの可能性も研究している。OUJは遠隔大学として、デジタル放送(地上波及びBS)、印刷、インターネットを教材配信手段として利用しているが、今後スマートメディアが新たな学習プラットフォームになり、教育メディアが融合、学習コンテンツがクロスメディア化することを予想し、新たなコンテンツ開発や配信・出版のありようについて検討している。くわえて今後、生涯学習者の学習環境は、個別化・個性化(personalization)することが予想され、コンテンツも画一的なものではなく学習者の特性に応じてカスタマイズすべきものになることから、完成品としてのコースウエアかばかりでなく、コンテンツ素材についても共有再利用・流通する仕組みと、新たなインターネット上での教育サービス・ビジネスの可能性について深い関心を有している。
わが国における学術教育資源のための情報基盤整備: 国立情報学研究所の貢献
Information Infrastructure for Academic/Educational Resources in Japan: NII’s contributions
- 山地一禎 (国立情報学研究所・准教授) / Kazutsuna Yamaji, Associate Professor, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan
Abstracts
Worldwide activities on open access have triggered many Japanese universities to develop institutional repositories (IRs). This talk explains our supporting project for IRs in accordance with library activity. Although current majority of contents are journal articles, however, IRs have a potential to preserve wide range of academic resources including research and learning materials. These possibilities are also discussed in this talk.
日本における電子出版の現状
E-publishing in Japan
- 三瓶徹 (一般社団法人 日本電子出版協会 事務局長) / Tohru Sampei, Secretary General, Japan Electronic Publishing Association (JEPA), Japan
Abstracts
In Japan, about 78,000 new titles are being brought out to the market every year. Japan is a tiny country; its total land area is only one twenty-fifth of that of the United States of America. But there are about 15,000 book shops in Japan, which is almost the same number of bookshops exist in the U.S. This means we can find a bookshop almost every corner of the country. And thanks to the resale system, a book of the same title can be bought at one price wherever you go in Japan. Also a price of a Japanese paperback book is less expensive than the US counterpart. In addition, the Japanese paperback is less bulky and easier to read with reader-friendly fonts and layouts. Under these circumstances, it is hard to find incentives for Japanese consumers to buy e-books.
About 25 years have passed since electronic publishing started in Japan, but digitalization of books has been advanced and well accepted only in such special areas as dictionaries, informative materials for legal and medical issues, and comics for mobiles. Although magazines (weekly and monthly), how-tos, and fictions have been digitalized on a trial-and-error basis, there has been no clear business model in sight.
In university libraries in Japan, there are collectively about 200 million books written in Japanese. There are only a few countries in the world where lectures or classes can be offered by the use of academic books written only in their mother tongue. Those few countries are the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Japan. English is the international language, but Japanese is not. And the digitalization of Japan’s academic books has not been promoted enough to become accessible globally. If this situation remains unchanged, Japan’s academic publishing industry would find itself hard to keep going. As a result, it would be difficult for them to satisfy the needs of those prospective readers who would like to obtain academic information written in Japanese.
In order to strengthen the competitiveness of Japan’s academic skills, technologies, and industries, it is necessary to significantly increase the volume of digitalized lecture books and specialized books.
Backed by the current advancing web technologies, moving images, sound and even complicated programs can be incorporated into digital books. There would be less and less boundaries in conventional meanings, which have identified one thing from others such as television, movies, music, and books. Electronic publishing has unlimited potential.
日本では、1年間に78,000点の書籍が出版される。日本は米国の1/25の狭い国だが、書店は、ほぼ同数の15,000店もあり、再販制度のおかげで日本中のどこででも同じ価格で買える。しかも、米国に較べ安い。文字もレイアウトも綺麗で読みやすい。従って、日本では読者が電子書籍を買う動機が少ない。
日本で電子出版が始まって25年になるが、電子化が進んでいるのは、辞書と、法律系、医学系の情報サービス、そして携帯電話向けコミックぐらいで、週刊誌や、雑誌、実用書、文芸系の書籍などは試行錯誤が続いているが、ビジネスモデルの見通しは明確ではない。
日本の大学の図書館には、延べ2億冊の日本語で書かれた本がある。母国語で書かれた学術書だけを使って大学の授業が出来る国は少ない。米国と英国を除けば、日本ぐらいだろう。ところが日本語の学術書の電子化が進んでいない。この状況が続けば、英語の学術情報ばかりが効率的に伝達し、日本の学術出版が地盤沈下して、日本語で学術情報を読みたい読者の要求に応えられなくなってしまう。
日本の学術、技術、産業の競争力強化のために、電子化された日本語の教科書や専門書を、大幅に増やす必要がある。
また、電子出版は進化しつつあるWeb技術を取り込んだので、動画や音だけでなく、複雑なプログラムも実行することができる。TVや映画、音楽、本といった旧来のジャンルの境目がなくなり、電子出版には多くの可能性がある。
第4部 パネルディスカッション「将来への展望: テクノロジーと国際標準」
Part 4: Panel "Prospects: Technologies and International Standardization"
Topic 1: ARIADNE: From Repository to the Cloud
- Frans Van Assche, Secretary General, GLOBE
Abstracts
ARIADNE started as a repository for educational material more than 15 years ago with the aim of fostering the sharing and reuse of educational material. Over the last decade, it evolved into a federation of repositories and was a founding member of GLOBE, a federation of federations. The next steps will be to offer repository services in the cloud such that anyone with interesting educational material or anyone who wishes to compile a repository from existing material somewhere in the world, can do this without being constrained by infrastructure problems.
Topic 2: COMÈTE, an RDF-based Architecture for a Learning Objects Management System
- Gilbert Paquette, Director, LORNET Canadian research network & Director of the CICE Research Chair, LICEF Research Center, Télé-université, Quebec, Canada
- Frédéric Bergeron, Senior Analyst, LICEF Research Center, Télé-université, Quebec, Canada
Abstracts
Building on the LORNET project achievements and three previous systems, a new project financed by the Ministry of Education of Quebec aims to build a francophone space for the sharing of Learning Objects. This presentation will focus on the architecture of a new system and the way it is addressing the harvesting problem in a network of repositories using various standards and profiles.
Topic 3: Learning Resource Exchange: A Standard-Based Learning Resource Exchange for Schools
- Tien-Dung Le, Senior Developer / Researcher, European Schoolnet
Abstracts
The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) is a service that provides schools with access to educational content from many different origins. From a technical standpoint, it consists of an infrastructure that:
- Federates systems that provide learning resources (e.g., learning resource repositories, authoring tools) and
- Offers a seamless access to these resources by educational systems that enable their use (e.g., educational portals, virtual learning environments.
As the number of connected systems increased over time, this infrastructure had to evolve in order to improve the quality of its search service. This presentation describes the current LRE infrastructure, the standards it is based on and explains the rationale behind its evolution.
http://lreforschools.eun.org
Topic 4: On the Search for Collaborative Open Educational Resources: Latin American Initiatives for a Global Improvement of Education
- Xavier Ochoa, Principal Professor, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL), Guayaquil, Ecuador
Abstracts
Open Educational Resources offer several benefits mostly in education and training. Being potentially reusable, their use can reduce time and cost of developing educational programs, so that these savings could be transferred directly to students through the production of a large range of open, freely available content, which vary from hypermedia to digital textbooks. This paper discuss this issue and presents a project and a research network that, in spite of being directed to Latin America’s reality and need, search for answers that would help to solve some educational questions that go beyond countries’ boundaries.
Topic 5: ARIADNE and Learning Analytics
- Erik Duval, Professor, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Abstracts
As we provide abundance of learning objects (see http://ariadne-eu.org/), it becomes more and more imperative to observe and understand what students and teachers do with the content. That is our focus in learning analytics (see http://www.solaresearch.org/ and http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2090118).
In essence, Learning Analytics is about collecting traces that learners leave behind and using those traces to improve learning. Educational Data Mining can process the traces algorithmically and point out patterns or compute indicators. My personal interest is more in using the traces in order to empower learners to be ‘better learners’. To this effect, my team focuses on building dashboards that visualize the traces in ways that help learners or teachers to steer the learning process. I like this approach because it focuses on helping people rather than on automating the process. It is inspired by a ‘modest computing’ approach where the technology is used to support what we want people to be good at (being aware of what is going on, making decisions, …) by leveraging what computers are good at (repetitive, boring tasks…).
I will illustrate my talk with examples from several of our projects, including ROLE (http://www.role-project.eu/) and EMURGENCY (http://emurgency.eu/).
第5部 パネルディスカッション「将来への展望: 持続可能な流通モデルと付加価値サービス」
Part 5: Panel "Prospects: Sustainable models and New Value-added Services"
Topic 1: Quality Assurance in Open Education: Building Trust in OER with New and Old Academic Traditions
- Gerard L. Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT and Senior Director for Academic Technology Services, California State University System
Abstracts
Awareness of OER has grown to a level where the acceptance of OER is growing beyond the marginalized innovators. The process of accepting OER as legitimate content for education has a number of requirements that OER must meet. These requirements can be organized around quality assurance indicators and processes that enable individual faculty and institutional cultures to trust and acclaim the content to be accurate, pedagogically effective, and readily adoptable by faculty and institutions. The presentation will review how the California State University and MERLOT have been supporting new and old traditions of quality assurance, including peer reviews by disciplinary experts, institutional branding, local community filtering, adoption indicators, and recommendations from like-minded community members. The presentation will also review strategies for higher education institutions to develop its traditions (e.g. policies and initiatives) that would help build trust in an institutional culture of higher education for open education.
Topic 2: Australian Curriculum Connect Project
- Jerry Leeson, Director Business Solutions, Education Services Australia
Abstracts
Over the past few years the Australian Government has embarked on a number of large-scale, National initiatives aimed at delivering education into our schools in a manner appropriate for the 21st Century. One of the key initiatives in this strategy is the implementation of a ‘National Curriculum’. Previously, each State and Territory was responsible for the development and implementation of their own curriculums. The move to a national curriculum will allow for consistency across the whole country and will also increase the capacity for sharing across State/jurisdictional boundaries. This presentation will discuss some of the challenges and approaches being used to implement the National Curriculum.
Topic 3: Cognitive Services of Learning in Taiwan
- Chen-Yu Lee, Section manager, Technology R&D Section, e-Learning Center, Digital Education Institute, III
Abstracts
Facing the crisis of aging and the declining birthrate, how to maintain and enhance learner’s cognitive ability has become a primary issue in medical and educational field. Research has pointed out that e-learning system (computerized working memory training) can effectively improve fluid intelligence, enhance memory and reading ability. However, these statements lacked analysis and evaluation as how the e-learning system could enhance cognitive ability. Our brain is a "use and disuse" organ, starting from the embryo, the progressive development of the nervous system, up until adulthood, our brains are in development. Process requires proper nutrition, appropriate stimulation of learning, in order to promote brain cell activation and coupling. Therefore, this research studied provide an open brain e-learning system which could effectively enhance the cognitive ability including memory, attention, visual spatial etc.. and evaluating its effectiveness.
Topic 4: Open Learning Networks: Building OER Practice Through Knowledge Sharing
- Letha Kay Goger, Digital Librarian, OER Commons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), USA
Abstracts
The OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a global imperative. Open Educational Resources, or OER, offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes and effective technologies to engage with learning for all. Partnering with key stakeholders and working with educators globally, ISKME is addressing the central issues related to teacher roles and skills, and to the challenges related to access and customization of high-quality curriculum worldwide.
Topic 5: TCU-GLOBE: Enabling learning resources sharing in Thailand and throughout the GLOBE
- Anuchai Theeraroungchaisri, Deputy Director, Thailand Cyber University Project, Thailand
Abstracts
TCU-GLOBE is one of Thailand Cyber University’s (TCU) strategic projects to promote sharing of learning resources amongst Thai academic. Since there is a large number of a university in Thailand, there are many challenges facing Thai Higher education. The major challenge comes from the wide range of educational quality and limited educational resources including both human and learning resources. Effective sharing learning resources among Thai academic will reduce the cost of investment, budgeting, and time consuming for learning resources development for the whole country. This initiative will also improve the quality of education of the small universities that have fewer or limited resources.
TCU-GLOBE will be the enabling technology for learning resources sharing in Thailand and also connecting and sharing learning resources between Thai academic to all people throughout the GLOBE consortium.
TCU-GLOBE has been developed according to the technological guideline, suite of online services and tools from the GLOBE, namely Ariadne Knowledge Pool System. Major features extended to the tools are 1) Support of Dublin Core metadata 2) Flexible user interface based on XC Drupal Toolkit. 3) Automatic Thai-English cross translation for keyword searching via web service; 4) Switchable interface language (Thai-English); 5) Configurable search facet allows search result to be filtered by many, configurable, criteria, for examples: source portal, author, document type, subject heading, media format, language etc.
In the pilot phase, TCU will establish learning resources network with 9 regional hub (a prominent public university within each regional area) and also with the Institute for Promotion of Science and Technology (IPST), who have a lot of Science and Technology learning resources for primary and secondary education; Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, who have a large number of learning resources, to implement learning resources sharing network and disseminate the learning resources to the all universities and Thai people.
There are still major challenges about sharing learning resources including personal’s attitude towards sharing and using other learning resources. This may be classified as "Not invent here syndrome". There are also questions of how and what learning resources suitable for sharing.
Thank you to Prof. Tsuneo Yamada from OUJ and Erik Duval from ARIADNE, who have continuously supported the development of TCU-GLOBE. Appreciations also go to all researchers and developers from TCU’s member universities, Prof. Vilas Wuwongse from Asia Institute of Technology University and Dr. Nisachol Chamnongsri from Suranaree University of Technology for leading the development of this TCU-GLOBE.
