Web20ERC
Work on Web2.0ERC project by DIT, PUE team
In the period of January 2010 – December 2011, the team of the Department of Information Technology (DIT) at the Poznan University of Economics (PUE) worked on the European project entitled “European Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education”. The project aimed at creating a simple to use and secure Web2.0 environment for teachers and students to use in daily educational activities and popularisation of the use of Web2.0 tools and technologies in education.
During the final evaluation by the European Commission, the project has been awarded an excellent score of 9/10 points.
The team of the Department of Information Technologies at the PUE played a key role in the fulfillment of the project goals:
1. Web2.0ERC Web platform
The Web 2.0 ERC platform has been developed by the DIT team in order to provide an easy-to-use, secure environment for applying Web 2.0 technologies to teaching. Within the platform, creation and structuring of educational content is simplified due to wizards implemented as extensions to the Moodle learning environment. A number of Web 2.0 resources and activities are accessible for teachers and students on the platform in learning courses. These activities include blog, social bookmarking, e-portfolio, wiki, friends IM, Twitter feeds, video embedding, and others.
A key element of the platform is the access control system, enabling the platform to be efficiently and securely managed by a distributed community of educationalists. Since learning content is created by teachers and students in a decentralized manner, designing and applying a proper access control model for the platform is crucial for its security.
The Web2.0ERC platform has been implemented, deployed on-line, and made available to teachers and students by DIT team. A total of over 1600 teachers and students used the platform during the project, exceeding the targets in all categories. The courses were run at 45 different institutions across Europe, covering different cognate areas: languages, sciences, social science, technology, business, media and art. The evaluation that was carried out as part of the project indicated that over 90% of users believed that the platform was useful to support the learning process and almost 90% liked its look and feel.
2. Developing training materials, project documents and publishing project outcomes in research papers
The DIT team created and co-created training materials, project documents and published project outcomes in 5 research papers. Following documents have been contributed by DIT.
- An extensive review of the literature on Web2.0 and education
- A review of open-source Web2.0 tools
- Production of some ‘How To’ guides
- Development of the Pedagogy2.0 Framework
- Production of Pedagogical guides
- Production of platform tutorials, e.g.:
- Production of Instructional videos
- Production of the teacher training courses
- Analysis of Training Courses
- Production of 10 Use Case Scenarios
- Production of various academic and professional papers
3. Dissemination
The DIT team were also responsible for coordinating project dissemination activities (work package 9), thus greatly contributing to the overall success of the project.
- Creation of project website (http://www.web20erc.eu/), Facebook page, Youtube channel and internal communications spaces.
- Production of Web2.0ERC Dissemination Strategy, Production of Web2.0ERC Brochure, Production of Newsletters, Production of Web2.0ERC Exploitation Plan
European Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education - general information
Project website: http://www.web20erc.eu/
This project aims to enable the mass of educators who find ICT confusing and frightening to have a simple and secure environment to use ICT within their class. Today the ability of educators to use, create content and communicate on the Web is limited by complexity and sophistication of the offers available. Moreover, many tools exist and teachers do not have time nor expertise to identify the best solution for their needs. Meanwhile students use and communicate easily and openly using Web2.0 tools (blogs , wikis, social networking, etc.) and the technology gap between educators & students grows despite best efforts of national and European agencies. These tools have pedagogic value arising from sharing, communication and knowledge discovery that teachers could use to provide a more motivating, engaging, relevant and collaborative environment for students.
There is a clear need for:
- understanding how Web2.0 tools can be used effectively within education,
- developing a pedagogy and guides for Web2.0 at an appropriate level for educators,
- examples of best practices,
- an integrated and secure environment (restricted to educators & their students),
- single source for these tools with appropriate support.
This project will:
- establish a European Resource Centre (ERC) for simplified and targeted Web2.0 tools, for schools, higher education and adult education,
- provide clear examples of how to use them in class with accompanying pedagogy, guides and videos,
- produce a customisable Integrated Web2.0 Platform for educators to use,
- evaluate the platform with institutions across Europe,
- foster and build collaborative communities to exchange best practice and for experienced Web2.0 educators to mentor new users,
- disseminate results.
Impact will be a significant increase in number of educators who can use Web2.0 tools in a pedagogically sound way, leading to an increase in the digital competency of both educators and students.