Teachers of all subjects and levels, educational professionals, policy makers and repository contributors were invited to attend the ODS Opening Day event: “Open Digital Resources in Education & School Innovation” workshop seminar, hosted by the Open Discovery Space European initiative. The event took place in Ellinogermaniki Agogi in Attica Greece, on Thursday June 20th.

The ODS Portal launch was the major point of interest at the Open Day. The Portal provides users with various ways of discovering learning resources and empowers them to contribute to Open Discovery Space, while making available more services to support the educational scenarios and the communities. In this context, specific components are also available that may be used by non-expert users in order to deploy lightweight, community versions of portal services (MyDiscoverySpace) being connected with the ODS content and the social infrastructure. The development of 37 on-line communities to the beta version of the portal was supported by the Open Day. 40 educational objects were uploaded on the portal and 16 educational template scenarios have been uploaded in the community of teachers interested in cross-curricular approaches and competence-based learning.

Talks on a range of relevant issues, such as European E-Learning Policies, the role of e-learning in the Opening up Education agenda, the development of multilingual educational social media and what ODS can offer to a school, were discussed and then followed by presentations of innovative teaching practices involving e-learning sources, as well as a two-hour workshop on how to use the available resources on ODS, how to create a school e-library on ODS and how to build an ODS community of teachers and schools.

The full program can be accessed here.

One central activity during the summer school was getting participants to modify templates according to their discipline and the needs of their students. Some of the templates available for modification promoting project based teaching and student centred learning included one entitled 'Guided Research Model' and one called 'Linguistic Based teaching.' The summer school consisted of a series of presentations and hands on workshops. The workshops were held in multimedia labs where each individual had access to a PC and carried out planned exercises. Moreover, visiting informal sites such as The National History Museum of Crete, The Knossos Archaeological Site, The Herakleion Archaeological Museum and the Skinakas Observatory, in order for attendees to be introduced to innovative ways to fuse creative links between schools, research centres and museums as informal learning settings.

For more information please visit the official website here.

Open Discovery Space held a workshop, a keynote speech and 2 paper presentations at the “Learning Innovations and Quality (LINQ) 2013” conference on the 16th and 17th of May 2013 in Rome, Italy. A variety of prominent figures important to the fields of technology-enhanced learning, open educational resources, and vocational education in Europe and worldwide had come together to discuss the future of digital resources.

ODS was disseminated at the ‘Open Software, Open Education’ conference' on the 17th of May 2013 to regional government in Spain and NGO educational institutions. The audience addressed included the Education Technology Platform of The Community of Madrid and the Alia2 Foundation.

Similarly, ODS was presented on the 11th of May 2013 to an audience of teachers, as part of the ICT in Education conference. The main objective of the conference was for educators to share their practices on how technology could be integrated into education. The event took place in Thurles, Ireland.

ODS was also present at a variety of events in Germany, Switzerland and Greece.

The EU High Level Group on the modernisation of higher education in Europe has published its first report, which claims graduates can be “set on the path to success” with an education that “incorporates technology in learning”. The group, which is chaired by Mary McAleese, former President of the Republic of Ireland, argues “technology is increasingly offering us the possibility of the virtual faculty, the virtual college… which scours the world for the very best teachers and makes them available online to students globally.” The report welcomes the opportunities this presents for education in Europe, by increasing student expectations and integrating ICT to “enhance ‘traditional’ ways of delivering education.” For teachers, there is a note of caution, that new technologies will not only drive forward new and innovative learning methods, but increase standards too, urging that “Poor teachers beware!”.

The report makes 16 initial recommendations, including that higher education institutions should offer greater support to teachers to develop the “skills for online and other forms of teaching and learning opened up by the digital era.” The eight member panel includes leading experts from the fields of politics, technology and education from across Europe. It’s next report, due to be published in June 2014 has promised to examine in closer detail “new modes of delivering quality higher education” including online learning and e-resources to augment the traditional classroom experience.

This latest report is of particular interest to Open Discovery Space, as it highlights the rapid changes in how education is being practiced across the EU, and the commitment of leading experts and policy makers to embrace the opportunities new technologies provide to improve education and develop new and innovative tools for learning.

For more information please see the original article here or read the group’s full report online.

European e-Learning has fast developed from a young and ambitious challenger to conventional learning methodologies, to something that plays an essential role in the education of millions of students across the continent. e-Learning in Europe continues to grow, with revenues for the sector set to top €6.1 billion in Europe by 2016, according to according to market researchers Ambient Insight, a growth rate of 5.8% since 2011.

The first European e-learning ‘barometer’, conducted by CrossKnowledge, found that the UK, Spain, and the Benelux nations have led the way in e-learning uptake, with nearly 40% of companies now saying that they train the majority of their employees using e-learning techniques.

In the UK in particular, where e-Learning is a more recent innovation in teaching, policy makers have promised renewed support for e-Learning in the state sector. Just this month, the British Education Secretary, Michael Gove, said the Department for Education would give teachers the freedom to use and develop new e-Learning tools as they see fit. In higher education, an area where Britain has a reputation as a world leader, even the country’s oldest and prestigious respected institutions have embraced e-Learning as a way of staying competitive. A new partnership between some of the UK’s leading universities, including St. Andrews, King’s College London and the Open University, represents a European led challenge to the dominance of the US in online education and so-called MOOCs.

Schools in Europe have been increasingly keen to embrace technology within the traditional classroom as well. In Belgium last year, the Sint-Jozef School of Commerce launched a radical new approach to classroom based learning, doing away with traditional print textbooks and instead mandating that all of its 710 students use an iPad to access course content. While the cost of a tablet device might be high, the school has introduced a new leasing system, where students can borrow an iPad for €110 a year, keeping the device after three years. Given the high cost of textbooks, which often publish new editions every year, using technology in the classroom is expected to save money for both students and the school in the long-run.

This is just a part of a wider move towards technology in the classroom though. Schools within the municipality of Odder, just south of Aarhus in Denmark, have attracted particular praise from education experts. Technology, including whiteboards and wireless networks in every classroom goes some way to explaining why Denmark consistently performs well on every measure of technical literacy. Denmark placed third in the World Economic Forum’s measure of ‘technological readiness’, according to its 2012-13 Global Competitiveness Report. Using smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices in the classroom has been welcomed as a way of introducing students to how they’ll interact with technology in the workplace later.