The final review of the ROLE project took place last month in Luxembourg, and my team from the Open University was given the award by the consortium for the whole project!
The final review meeting was very successful, concluding a 4-year endeavour of 16 institutions into the world of Personal Learning Environments and Self Regulated Learning. The reviewers commended the project partners on their technical and pedagogical work. Special commendations were received for the the work done in the test-beds of the project and for setting up a number of additional test-beds inside and outside the project consortium.
My team has coordinated the activities of all the project test-beds. In addition to the 5 original test-beds, 14 more were created, attracting more than 4,000 users. In order to raise awareness about Personal Learning Environments and Self Regulated Learning among eLearning communities, we have developed bespoke Open Educational Resources available as study units in OpenLearn (see http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=7433 and http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=7898) and as an interactive eBook (currently under production). We have also been particularly active in sharing, promoting and disseminating project results by organising a variety of workshop events, such as the annual International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments in Guatemala and in Germany.
Building on the success of the 1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012) which took place in Antigua, Guatemala, WCLOUD 2013 will take place in Aachen, Germany on May 6-8. The workshop is a shared event between the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU) and the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER).
Workshop Chairs
Hans-Christian Schmitz – Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Germany
Rocael Hernández – Galileo University, Guatemala
Alexander Mikroyannidis – The Open University, UK
Important Dates
Paper Submission: January 31 February 14
Authors Notification: February 22
Final Paper Submission and Registration: March 6
Last month, I co-organised the 1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012) in Antigua, Guatemala. It was 2 very interesting days, with paper presentations and discussions around various aspects of Cloud Education Environments. Around 50 people participated, equally representing Europe and Latin America.
The proceedings of the workshop have been published online from CEUR Workshop Proceedings and are available at: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-945. Extended versions of selected papers will also be published in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS).
For more info, see http://ges.galileo.edu/cloud-education-environments-workshop and http://news.kmi.open.ac.uk/11/18474.
I delivered a seminar about Responsive Open Learning Environments on July 18 at the Open University. The seminar introduced the core concepts behind the ROLE project and gave a chance to participants to try out some of the technologies developed by the project.
The podcast of this event is available at http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/iet-tcm. The online resources used during this event can be accessed from here: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/6152.
I am co-organising an international workshop on Cloud Education Environments, on November 15-16 in Antigua Guatemala. The workshop will focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing cloud education environments, both from a teaching and a learning perspective. Best papers will be selected for submission of an extended version in a Special Issue on Cloud Education Environments of the Journal of Universal Computer Science.
Important Dates
Extended Abstracts (2 pages): 30 Sept
Notification of acceptance: 10 Oct
Camera-ready submissions (6 pages): 4 Nov