A Digital Platform for Learning and Sharing: The Development of the Open Science Resources Portal

The advent of the internet has made the access to digital resources including educational material inexpensive and easy. The exploitation of the content developed by institutions involved in formal and informal learning activities yet is often limited by the lack of visibility, classification and validation of the content. The EU project Open Science Resources aims at the improvement of the accessibility and usability of digital science learning resources through the development of a joint web repository. Set up in 2009 through a consortium of 21 institutions, the portal has been continuously adapted through the involvement of a large number of users in research and training workshops. Research and training workshops as well as summer schools involving teachers, students and general museum visitors have been conducted for the past 26 months in 9 countries parallel to the technical implementation of the portal. The structured activities included a formal introduction to the functionality of the portal, a presentation of contents and the creation of the users' own educational content including educational pathways to be used in classroom activities. Emphasis was given to social tagging of resources for the creation of user based folksonomies. The workshops concluded with a formal validation procedure including the assessment of portal functions and the scenarios of usage. More than 1000 users have been involved in the trials of the portal that already hosts more than 1300 educational materials and more than 100 educational pathways for structured activities. The user feedback led to several modifications of the search functionality and the structure of the educational pathways. 11000 social tags have been added by portal users for the enrichment of the contributer metadata in the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. As a fraction of such tags is not included in the original database, the analysis of the tags and the user search patterns shows that the tagging helps users to find resources in the repository. For the development of a multilingual web portal of science learning material, field research on learning practices and user expectations is crucial for the improvement of the portal functionality and the creation of communities of practice. The inclusion of non-expert metadata from social tagging enhances the search function beyond expert keywords. To achieve sustainability of the portal beyond the present proof-of-concept, the involvement of a total of 5000 users is intended until May 2012.