Edukalibre - "Libre Sofware Methods for E-Education"

Funding: European Comission under the Socrates/Minerva program

Project leader: Jesús M. González-Barahona, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid - Spain

Period: 2 years: 1 October 2004 - 31 December 2005 (extended)

Project Web Site: http://www.edukalibre.org/

Motivation

Most educational institutions, and specially Universities, are exploring the possibilities of web-based information systems applied to education. Currently, most institutions are planning to use those systems for reinforcing or complementing traditional teaching techniques, but in many cases new educational paradigms are emerging. New methodologies are needed to provide effective ways of sharing and re-using software components that can flexibly be adapted to a variety of web-based educational paradigms. While the potential of the libre methodology for shared development and exploitation of software has been demonstrated worldwide, its application to web-based education has not been explored in a systematic way.

Description

Edukalibre is a project funded by the European Comission under the Socrates/Minerva program (aimed at the promotion of information and communications technology in education). Its main goal is to explore new ways of producing educational materials, based in the practices and procedures observed in the libre (free, open source) software development community. Some of the key aspects being explored are the stress on collaborative development, the interaction with users, and the use of version control systems for documentation, in the context of the educational communities. In the end, we are proposing tools and procedures for the creation of educational materials.

My contribution

I was the local (Lugano) coordinator of the project. In the context of this project, we implemented GISMO, a tool for the monitoring of the students' progresses and activities in Course Management Systems (main contributor: Christian Milani). We also contributed in the usability study. In particular, we defined the evaluation framework, participated at the usability testing, and partecipated at the analysis of the results (main contributor: Luca Botturi).

Publications (see publications page for pdf files)

 
P7 Jesús M. González Barahona, Diego Chaparro, Vania Dimitrova, Chris Tebb, Riccardo Mazza. Producing educational resources in the “libre way”: the edukalibre project. In: IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2005. Lisbon, Portugal. 19-22 October 2005. pp. 69-76. IADIS press. ISBN: 972-8924-02-X
R8 Riccardo Mazza, Christian Milani. Exploring Usage Analysis in Learning Systems: Gaining Insights From Visualisations. In: Workshop on Usage analysis in learning systems. 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2005). Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 18 July 2005. pp 65-72
R7 Riccardo Mazza, Christian Milani. GISMO: a Graphical Interactive Student Monitoring Tool for Course Management Systems. T.E.L.’04 Technology Enhanced Learning ’04 International Conference. Milan, 18-19 November 2004.

Edukalibre was Project of the month in November 2006 at the university of Lugano: see Italian description or English description

NOTE: outcomes of this project are published on other papers not listed above. A  complete list of publications is reported on the project web site

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