Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045 4_OSR Second Annual Report_final.pdf · the “OSR Q&A”, meant to help all users easily familiarize with the OSR project, and the “OSR

D-1.4 OSR Second Annual Report

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Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045

OpenScienceResources: Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for

Formal and Informal Science Education www.openscienceresources.eu - www.osrportal.eu

OSR Second Annual Report

June 2010 – May 2011

Deliverable number/name D-1.4 OSR Second Annual Report

Dissemination level Public

Delivery date July 2011

Status Final

Authors

Marzia Mazzonetto (Ecsite); Jennifer

Palumbo (Ecsite); Sofoklis Sotiriou

(Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Eleftheria

Tsourlidaki (Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Fotis

Kouris (Ellinogermaniki Agogi); Kati

Clements (JYU); Kati Tyystjärvi (Heureka)

eContentplus

This project is funded under the eContentplus programme1,

a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and

exploitable.

1 OJ L 79, 24.3.2005, p. 1.


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Table of Contents

1 THE OSR PROJECT AT A GLANCE ....................................................................................................... 4

1.1 OSR Q&A ....................................................................................................................................... 4 1.2 OSR AND ME ................................................................................................................................... 6 1.3 THE OSR CONSORTIUM AT A GLANCE .................................................................................................... 9

2 PROJECT RESULTS/ACHIEVEMENTS ............................................................................................... 11

2.1 THE CHRONICLE OF OSR ................................................................................................................... 11

3 THE OSR EDUCATIONAL CONTENT ................................................................................................. 14

3.1 TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COMMON DIGITAL REPOSITORY FOR FORMAL AND INFORMAL SCIENCE

EDUCATION.............................................................................................................................................. 14 3.2 DESCRIPTION OF THE OSR LEARNING OBJECTS ...................................................................................... 14 3.3 DESCRIPTION OF THE OPEN SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS ................................................................ 15 3.4 OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES EDUCATIONAL CONTENT .............................................................................. 18 3.5 EXAMPLES OF LEARNING OBJECTS AVAILABLE ........................................................................................ 29

4 TARGETED USERS AND ACTIVITIES ................................................................................................. 35

5 IMPACT & SUSTAINABILITY ............................................................................................................ 38

5.1 OSR IMPACT TO THE TARGET GROUPS ................................................................................................. 38 5.2 IMPACT TO THE SCHOOL COMMUNITIES ............................................................................................... 38 5.3 IMPACT TO THE MUSEUM VISITORS ..................................................................................................... 40 5.4 IMPACT TO THE MUSEUM EDUCATORS ................................................................................................ 40 5.5 SUSTAINABILITY OF OSR APPROACH .................................................................................................... 42 5.6 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE PORTAL .......................................................................................................... 42 5.7 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE OSR SERVICES ................................................................................................. 42 5.8 SUSTAINABILITY OF THE OSR USER BASE ............................................................................................... 42


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List of Figures

Figure 1 Success indicators 31.3.2011 ................................................................................................... 12

Figure 2: View of the “Propose preliminary explanation or Hypothesis” step in the pre-visit phase of a

structured pathway. All the supporting materials are listed below the respective text and are also

linked to the text. .................................................................................................................................. 16

Figure 3: The organization of the different stages of a structured pathway. ....................................... 16

Figure 4: The OSR Repository facilities allow users to search for educational content and learning

activities, as well as to upload their own content in order to share it with others and to develop their

own learning activities .......................................................................................................................... 18

Figure 5: By using Second Life users may visit Foucault’s pendulum at the OSR are in Ellinogermaniki

Agogi island and learn about Foucault’s experiment, watch related videos as well as various observe

images illustrating pendulums around the world. ................................................................................ 19

Figure 6: This figure indicates the information provided from the OSR portal for every educational

pathway and learning object ................................................................................................................. 20

Figure 7: Content in the OSR Database March 2011 ............................................................................. 21

Figure 8: OSR Repository Content Growth ............................................................................................ 21

Figure 9: OSR Content User Rating ........................................................................................................ 22

Figure 10: OSR Users ............................................................................................................................. 23

Figure 11: Users Contributing Content in the OSR Repository. 281 users out of 974 have contributed

some form of content ........................................................................................................................... 24

Figure 12: Number of Items per Language including those available in two or more languages. ........ 24

Figure 13: Distribution of Content by Age -Range ................................................................................ 25

Figure 14: Types of Content .................................................................................................................. 25

Figure 15: Number of tags added per contributing user. It is of interest to notice that one user has

added 1157 tags another one 527 while the majority (73 users) have added only 1 tag. ................... 26

Figure 16: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository without Free Tags ......................... 27

Figure 17: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository ....................................................... 27

Figure 18: Number of Tags per Learning Object. The majority of objects have 4 and less tags. .......... 28

Figure 19: The Collections for Human Physiology from Ciencia Viva ..…………………………………………….. 28

Figure 20: The Collections from Eugenides Foundation on light ……………………………………………………… 29

Figure 21: The Collections from La Cite on climate and pollution …………………………………………………… 30

Figure 22: An extract from the structured educational pathway of the History of Atom ………………… 31

Figure 23: number and origin of OSR portal page visits at its first birthday (from February 2010 to

February 2011) ...................................................................................................................................... 36


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1 The OSR Project at a Glance

The Open Science Resources (OSR) First Annual Report describes the overall context and

objectives of the OSR project. In this Second Annual Report we introduce two new aspects:

the “OSR Q&A”, meant to help all users easily familiarize with the OSR project, and the “OSR

and Me” section, created to help interested users understand the unique advantages that

the OSR portal offers them and how they can get involved.

The OSR project has been running successfully for two full years and is scheduled to

continue one more year until 2012. In this second year of activity, the consortium has

succeeded to reach all of its objectives on many fronts, especially with respect to the

uploading of content, in terms of resources and social tags, to the OSR portal, which is the

main output produced by the consortium. Efforts to disseminate the project have been

widespread and complete thanks to the strong leadership provided by the coordinator,

Ecsite (the European Network of Science Centre and Museums, with 400 members across

Europe), and strongly supported by the consortium. As more and more users get involved in

the fast growing OSR portal, it is now more important than ever that they are given the

opportunity to quickly and easily understand what the project is about and how they can get

involved. In the following paragraphs these explanations are given in one of the most user-

friendly formats used to connect with all types of users: the “Questions&Answers” list and

the “OSR and Me” page.

1.1 OSR Q&A

What is OSR?

OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES (OSR) is a collaborative project co-funded by the European

Commission under the eContentplus programme. The project started in June 2009 and will

continue for 36 months. The aim of the OSR project is to create a shared repository of

scientific digital objects – currently dispersed in European science museums and science

centres - to make them more widely and coherently available, searchable and usable in the

context of formal and informal learning situations. The Open Science Resources (OSR) portal

enables you to access the finest digital collections in European science centres and

museums, to follow educational pathways connecting objects tagged with semantic

metadata and to enrich the contents provided with social tags of your own choice. To access

the OSR portal, visit www.osrportal.eu and sign in for free.

What can I find on the OSR portal?

The OSR portal includes numerous educational materials, organised in learning objects

(images of exhibits and scientific instruments, animations, videos, lesson plans, student

projects and many other formats) and educational pathways (collections of educational

materials meant to provide a comprehensive learning experience for a variety of situations.

Structured learning pathways are meant for forma learning groups, for example in a school

setting. These pathways guide the educator to take a series of steps that involve different

stages of learning and involvement starting from the preparation phase through to the


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follow-up after the main block of activities with guidelines for interactive museum visit

experiences). Structured learning pathways can be used as lesson plans on a certain topic,

adapted to a specific group of learners defined by age or level of experience. Open learning

pathways, on the other hand, are less structured groupings of educational resources. These

pathways are meant to allow users to collect the resources they find meaningful or

interesting either by theme, by user group, or by any other means, for use in a variety of

learning situations.

OSR is a highly accessible portal, presented through an easy and attractive interface and

equipped with state of the art searching tools. The OSR portal is aimed at different user

groups: students, teachers, families, museum visitors and general visitors. All users can

navigate between the finest digital collections in European science centres and museums,

guided by attractive educational pathways connecting the objects with well-defined

semantic metadata. Users can also enrich the contents provided with social tags of their own

choice. OSR learning materials form Educational Pathways which are presented as a storyline

connecting different objects, which may be physically kept in different European museums.

Which are the innovative aspects of OSR?

OSR is the first project aimed at gathering extremely valuable educational resources which

mix together different types of approaches and locations. An impressive abundance of high

quality digital content is normally stored in different repositories across Europe. However,

these resources remain largely unexploited due to a number of barriers such as the lack of

interoperability between repositories or multi-lingual issues. The Open Science Resources

(OSR) project presents a coordinated solution at a European level to make digital content

easily available to teachers and schools groups as well as science communication

professionals and the general public. Through the OSR portal you will be able to learn about

science through learning materials coming from museums / science centres all over Europe,

which offer a unique social context for learning. Innovation in the OSR portal starts by

encouraging user engagement with the museums and science centers content.

Why should I trust the OSR contents?

Reliable and highly experienced science centres and museums from across Europe have

joined forces to provide high-quality learning resources for the OSR portal. The OSR leading

science centres and museums have shared together a series of digital resources that are

normally available on their premises and from their individual websites. These resources are

designed to be adaptable to different learning situations, ranging from the formal classroom-

based education to the informal context, for instance in the science centre.

How is the OSR project contributing to the eContentplus priorities?

The unique competitive advantage of museums is that they can provide their visitors with

the real world context and the exploratory experiences that constructivists are advocating.

Through such enhanced opportunities to interact with scientific content, all Europeans

(students of all ages, teachers of all levels, researchers in the fields of science, history, or

culture, as well as the general public) can achieve more profound experiences from their

encounters with science education objects and hopefully become more oriented towards a

science culture that can make Europe a world leader in the highly competitive fields of


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science and technology. The OSR project will add its contribution towards these directions

by enhancing the status quo of digital science education content in Europe.

1.2 OSR and Me

Whether you are a student or a teacher, a museum visitor or educator or an internet user

just stopping by to take a look at the OSR portal, there are several ways in which you can get

involved with the portal, both to use its contents and to contribute to its development.

Searching...

The OSR portal contains educational material in the form of educational objects (images of

exhibits and scientific instruments, videos, animations, exercises, graphs, links) and of

educational pathways (structured and open learning activities organized according the

inquiry based pedagogical model). Users can search for the educational materials in the

"Explore OSR" section. The approach adopted aims to make the process of retrieving

information and resources as unobtrusive and intuitive as possible, in order to enhance the

user experience. The user-interfaces developed are multi-lingual by design and supports

both visit access mode and web access mode, so you can use the portal either from your

computer or from your PDA, directly inside the museum.

...and Uploading

Users can upload their own materials to the OSR Repository, using the "Share your Content"

section. Share your content: the OSR Tool-Box will provide you with all the necessary tools to

prepare your content for the OSR Repository. The OSR portal offers a unique authoring

environment to design and share your own educational materials, or use existing materials

to build your own pathways.

Social Tagging

User engagement with the museums and science centers content is encouraged through

social tagging of the educational objects and pathways. This is one of OSR's main innovative

points, since it provides a bridge between the education and collection staff in the museums

and the visitors, by allowing the visitors to share their experience with the exhibits. Tagging

lets users assert their own connections and associations between objects and phenomena in

ways that reflect personal perspectives and interests. Tagging further enables re-discovery

of activities previously performed; the users' tags record salient characteristics of personal

interest and support subsequent searches.

OSR goes mobile

Users can also have access to the OSR repository through mobile phones and PDA’s. Access

through mobile phones is especially useful, as museum visitors have the opportunity to use

the content from the portal during their visit to various exhibits. Moreover, the MoOSR

section currently includes 4 applications in English and in Greek that are especially designed

to be used through mobile phones. Six more mobile applications are in preparation and will


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be uploaded shortly. The applications are designed in html format, therefore removing the

obstacle of Flash and its incompatibility with the i-Phone and i-PAD.

OSR’s virtual life

Visit the OSR Camp in Second Life! Explore the Foucault's Pendulum interactive exhibit and

numerous other contents of the OSR Repository through a unique immersive experience in a

realistic context. From here you can download and install Second Life Viewer which is used

for entering the Sciences Camp in Second Life. Teleport to Sciences Camp.

The unique advantages of the OSR portal

These are some of the several unique advantages of the OSR portal which make it

particularly valuable for a wide variety of publics. Take a look at the following paragraphs:

you will for sure find at least one good reason to start navigating through the OSR portal!

I am a student and I would find it really helpful to have some extra resources to better

understand science topics. I wish our teachers would take us to a science centre...

The OSR Repository includes numerous educational materials (images of exhibits and

scientific instruments, animations, videos, lesson plans, student projects and educational

pathways with guidelines for interactive museum visit experiences). OSR offers young people

the opportunity to use several digital resources online (including interactive multimedia

applications) from science museums and science centres in the framework of their normal

school curriculum. Moreover, it contributes to the access to and sharing of advanced tools,

services and learning resources not only between schools, but also among science museums

and centres.

The OSR Portals allows people worldwide to access the high-quality educational materials

developed within science centres and museums in Europe. This enables users who live far

from a science centre or museum to benefit from the knowledge built in these institutions;

furthermore, learning pathways can be created by users themselves and are then shared

among the international community.

I am a teacher interested in new interactive resources for science learning, but I have never

been to a science centre...

The OSR portal comprises a wealth of learning pathways, which are structured collections of

educational materials and activities that can be used by teachers to put together lesson

plans about a specific topic or theme. These are linked with the school curricula in the

various countries of the project to enhance the value of the resources and the intercultural

understanding of the partners.

OSR demonstrates the need for the development of Learning Design Repositories (instead of

just digital repositories). It supports the teachers, both experienced and recently assigned, to

follow specific learning design approaches when delivering their instruction. It is not only

acting as a repository of materials but also as an effective training tool for the teachers and

the museum educators. Besides, the consortium includes some of the most prominent

content providers in the field, technology experts, pedagogical experts, educational policy

makers and standardization bodies and user communities throughout Europe.


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The Open Science Resources Educational Pathways span a wide range of subject matters and

target audiences in order to cover a variety of users’ needs. For example, the needs and

objectives of an individual teacher in terms of content can vary considerably from day to

day. A teacher may search for content for classroom use, for lesson planning, for home study

or for supporting a visit to a science museum. Each of these scenarios requires customized

content with distinct characteristics. The selected materials are linked to the school

curriculum, including guidelines and sample worksheets for the students, as well as

references and additional information.

I am a museum expert interested in new ways of collaborating with other

museums/science centres, sharing experiences and finding new ways to reach out to

audiences...

The Open Science Resources system provides a test bed for sharing best practices and

educational activities about the learning experiences offered by museums to both on-site

and on-line visitors. In the framework of the proposed activities, virtual and physical visitors

of the participating institutions are able to personalize a set of resources for reference and

problem solving. The museum experts help users work independently, co-operatively and in

an increasingly self-organized way. This is achieved by organizing field trips for schools that

are tangential to the curriculum, pre- and post-visit activities for other categories of visitors,

problem-solving approaches, ‘minds-on’ experiments and models of different kinds into

everyday life, heavily involving “real-reality” experiments in the “user-friendly” and engaging

environment of the science museum. The field trips act as best practices and demonstrators

that enable users to follow their individual pathway of learning. During these activities the

initial predictions of the visitors can be compared with data of the different experiments that

they have the chance to realise.

The Open Science Resources approach supports the work of the science museum design and

development team to innovate the exhibition. The explanatory and additional materials that

currently accompany the exhibits are produced for general use and they are presented to all

the different visitors’ categories.

I am interested in learning about science in a new interactive way but I am neither a

student nor a teacher and I never have the possibility to go to a science centre...

The OSR Portal allows people worldwide to access the high-quality educational materials

developed within science centres and museums in Europe. This enables users who live far

from a science centre or museum to benefit from the knowledge built in these institutions;

furthermore, learning pathways can be created by users themselves and are then shared

among the international community.

The Open Science Resources approach facilitates lifelong learning as it aims to improve

quality of learning by providing access to resources and services with significant educational

value. It supports the development of a better understanding of the role of science in society

and bringing science and scientific subjects closer to the citizen. The Open Science Resources

portal offers the opportunity to all publics to use numerous online digital resources

(including interactive multimedia applications) from science museums and science centres.

Moreover, it contributes to the access to and sharing of advanced tools, services and

learning resources which are normally accessible only through an exchange between schools

or among science museums and centres. Furthermore, the Open Science Resources

approach helps learners develop critical capacity and deeper understanding of the concepts


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underlying scientific investigation. The Open Science Resources approach aims at promoting

people’s interest in science by building on the strengths of both formal and informal

learning.

1.3 The OSR Consortium at a glance

The consortium that implements the OSR project includes a balanced mix of science

museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts,

user groups and standardization bodies.

Ecsite, the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, based in Belgium, is the

project coordinator.

The following organisations form the consortium:

∼ Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur - Austria

∼ Menon Network - Belgium

∼ Ellinogermaniki Agogi - Greece

∼ University of Bayreuth - Germany

∼ Lambrakis Foundation - Greece

∼ Deutsches Museum - Germany

∼ Heureka, The Finnish Science Centre - Finland

∼ Eugenides Foundation - Greece

∼ National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci - Italy

∼ Etablissement Public du Palais de la Découverte et de la Cité des Sciences et de

l'Industrie (Universcience) - France

∼ Palace of Miracles - Hungary

∼ Pavilion of Knowledge - Ciencia Viva, Portugal

∼ INTRASOFT Intl. - Luxembourg

∼ Linnaeus University - Sweden

∼ IKnowHow - Greece

∼ University of Jyväskylä - Finland

∼ Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education - USA

∼ University of Central Florida - USA

∼ The Science Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University - Taiwan, RoC

Several science centres and museums from the Ecsite network and beyond have expressed

an interest to interact with the OSR portal, either by taking part in the training seminars

organised by the project partners, or by contributing educational resources to the portal.

The centres and museums that have already become affiliated with the OSR project are the

following:

∼ Bibliotheca Alexandrina ALEXploratorium, Alexandria, Egypt

∼ Cite de Sciences a Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia

∼ Technopolis, Mechelen, Belgium

∼ Haus der Natur, Salzburg, Austria


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∼ Centro Ciência Viva, Aveiro, Portugal

∼ Ustanova Hiša eksperimentov, Ljubljana, Slovenia

∼ Domus - Museos Científicos Coruñeses, A Coruña, Spain

∼ Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne, England

∼ Science Centre AHHAA Foundation, Tartu, Estonia

∼ Centro Ciência Viva de Bragança, Braganca, Portugal

∼ Centro Ciência Viva Rómulo de Carvalho, Coimbra, Portugal

∼ Formicablu srl, Bologna, Italy

∼ Centro Ciência Viva Porto Moniz (Ilha da Madeira), Porto Moniz, Portugal

∼ Exploratório, Centro Ciência Viva de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

∼ Thinktank, Birmingham, UK


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2 Project Results/Achievements

In this section the project’s most important second year achievements are described, in

order to give readers a clear understanding of how they can use and benefit directly the

project development.

The OSR project is working successfully and exceeding expectations during its second year of

life, achieving most of its goals already before deadlines. The biggest challenges for the

second year have been connected with the technical improvements of the portal, which are

carried out quickly once the requirements are expressed by the consortium and the users.

Moreover, at the end of the year the foreseen improvements seem to be well underway.

The communication processes within the consortium have clearly improved since the first

year and the participation of the museum partners has been made more active, e.g. two

museum partners (HEUREKA, universcience) participate in the main decisions about the

project life and implementation.

2.1 The Chronicle of OSR

The OSR consortium includes some of the most prominent content providers in the field, as

well as technology experts, pedagogical experts, educational policy makers, standardization

bodies and user communities throughout Europe. The OSR partners come from 12 European

countries, covering a vast percentage of the European population. The physical visitors of

the 7 participating science centres and museums count on more than 4,000,000 visitors per

year while the virtual visitors through their web sites and digital repositories are

approaching 5,000,000. The consortium is coordinated by Ecsite, the European network of

Science Centres and Museums with about 400 member institutions in 30 European countries

(www.ecsite.eu). Through a systematic dissemination approach that includes a variety of

events and actions, Ecsite expands the impact of the project’s work to member institutions

in all member states. Additionally, the consortium includes partners from the USA and

Taiwan, who also contribute to the dissemination of the project outside the EU.

A great example of the strong capacity for dissemination in the consortium is the prize as

best paper for the OSR presentation in the EDEN 2010 conference titled: “Open Learning for

Science Education - The Richness of European Science Centres and Museums Connected to

Users and Learners Worldwide”. The OSR approach also earned the project the silver award

at the IMS Learning Impact Award. This award was given out in Long Beach, California on 16-

19 May 2011, in an event organized by the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

The OSR project development is constantly monitored by a Quality Assurance Team through

a set of success indicators. An overview of the project’s success indicators after the second

year can be seen in Figure 1. These success indicators were gathered on 31st

of May 2011,

End of Month 24.


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Figure 1: Success indicators 31.5.2011.

Objective -

expected result Indicators

Expected at

Year 2 (M24)

Actual at

M22 (31

March 2011)

Aggregate and make

interoperable a

critical mass of

content

Content (Learning

Pathways) 50 138

Content (Learning

Objects) 500 768

Social tags 5000 6732

Increase in use of

underlying content

Organization of

Training Workshops

(Summer Schools)

14 (2)

15 + 1

summer, 2

winter

schools

Organization of

validation

workshops

10 22

Users involved in

the trials

(requirements

elicitation, testing

and validation)

200

1628 (WP3) +

356 (WP6) =

1984

Affiliated Partners

(mainly science

centres and

museums)

5 15

EU Country

Coverage 27 27

Dissemination

Presentations in

conferences and

workshops

15 23(M18)+

11(M22) = 34

Publications in

scientific magazines 3

6 (M18)+ 5

(M22) = 13

Organization of

dissemination

workshops and

conferences

4 19 (M18)+ 5

(M24) = 24

Organization of

dissemination

events and “Open

Science Days”

5 4 (M18)+ 3

(M24) = 7

Participation to EC

clustering activities

(organization of

clustering events)

4(2) 6 (M18)+ 2

(M24) = 8

OSR Portal (single)

hits 30,000

138,812

pageviews;

15,942 visits


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Looking at the success indicator table after the second year, it is possible to draw

conclusions on how well the work has advanced. Overall, the OSR project has achieved

better results than foreseen in terms of most of its success indicators already two months

before the end of the second year. Therefore, the project can be said to be proceeding on

track. The number of affiliated science centres and museums will increase even more by the

end of the reporting period, since Ecsite will organise a workshop at the Ecsite Annual

Conference (May 25th 2011) with science centres and museum from across Europe to

involve new science centres and museums.

The OSR project’s main task is to produce the OSR Portal, a set of customizable learning-

oriented resources and services reliably offered through the web sites of science centres and

museums, school portals, visualization environments and other online education publishing

services. The portal hosts the metadata of learning objects allowing open discovery for the

users. The OSR project’s goal is to provide a service, which users can rely on and trust – this

cannot be achieved without quality assurance of the content. After the second year of the

project, the OSR consortium has taken several measures to assure the quality of the content

in the OSR portal, which include naming a group of content reviewers in charge of the

technical review of the materials online and introducing the possibility for users to report

inappropriate content through a dedicated button.

The OSR consortium is also working on the quality assurance of the content from a

community approach. This is achieved by following the specific quality approach based on

the ISO 19796-2 standard (ISO/IEC, 2009), but specific quality instruments will be used to

complete this measure. These quality instruments include a combination of community-

based mechanisms and quality control contributed by the project partners. During the

second year of the project, the quality assurance process for the content in the OSR portal

was implemented, this chapter talks about what was done since the end of the first year and

also outlines the new actions the consortium proposes to take in order to assure the quality

of social tags in the portal.

Quality management of content is well on its way and the project is further developing a

sustainable quality assurance procedure including both user based mechanisms and a quality

certificate of the project that is given to users/organizations who are providing high quality

materials. Trusted organizations such as the project partners can automatically upload

content which gets the OSR Technical Review Certificate. This is the first step towards

sustainability of the quality approach that OSR is implementing. The OSR project has also

taken steps to identify possible measures for assuring the quality of the social tags which

users can attach to OSR resources and pathways. This approach will be further defined in the

last annual quality report (3rd year).


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3 The OSR Educational Content

3.1 Towards the Development of a Common Digital Repository for Formal

and Informal Science Education

This chapter aims to present the Open Science Resources (OSR) content that is currently

stored in the OSR Repository (http://www.osrportal.eu/). The OSR Portal contains

educational material divided into two main categories. The first category is the learning

objects. Learning objects include collections of photos from museum exhibits, videos,

animations, exercises, graphs, guides, presentations, worksheets for students and numerous

other types of objects. The second pillar of the OSR portal content is a collection of

educational pathways that are divided into two categories. The first category addresses the

needs of formal learning. They are organized according to the Inquiry based teaching model

and especially designed to complement school visits (physical or virtual) to a museum or

science centre (structured lesson plans). The second category of learning activities involves

activities designed in a more unstructured manner (open lesson plans) so as to meet the

needs of informal learning during a visit to a museum or science centre.

3.2 Description of the OSR Learning Objects

A large amount of digital educational content has become available worldwide in the form of

online collections, digital repositories and libraries. This large amount of digital educational

content has the potential to support technology-enhanced learning. On the other hand, the

creation of quality educational resources is a costly process. Hence, reuse of high quality

learning materials has become a very important research topic for a variety of people,

organizations etc., as it can lead to an important reduction of development cost and time,

while at the same time it can improve the quality of technology-enhanced learning.

The OSR Portal aspires to become one of the main repositories of digital educational content

and a technology enhanced learning hub. For this purpose it is constantly enriched with high

quality content from the museums/science centers that are part of the OSR consortium but

also, and this is very important, by user generated content from its numerous users. The

digital educational content of OSR is indexed and stored in a way that facilitates reusability

and synthesis in structured ways (Educational Pathways) to promote both formal and

informal learning.

OSR educational content includes but is not limited to, photos, guides, simulations,

animations, tutorials, diagrams, audio and video clips, quizzes and assessments. OSR

educational content is far more than a pool of material for the user to select and present, it

has been created and characterized in such a way that it has been transformed into a

learning object. The main difference between a learning object and an information object is

that the learning object is designed to support a concrete educational goal: that is, it is

associated with one or more educational objectives.


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Moreover, each of the OSR learning objects has been enhanced with educational metadata

so that it becomes more accessible, better searchable and (re-)usable. OSR is using two sets

of metadata i) standardized using the IEEE LOM standard and ii) metadata directly

contributed by the end-user without making used of a standard, i.e. ‘social metadata’-social

tags as they are commonly known.

3.3 Description of the Open Science Educational Pathways

The term ‘Educational Pathway’ in the OSR project describes the organization and

coordination of various individual science learning resources into a coherent plan so that

they become a meaningful science learning activity for a specific user group (e.g. teachers,

students, other museum visitors, etc.) in a specific context of use. Further, educational

pathways directly serve the priority assigned by the project to the integration of resources

scattered in various science museums/centres into the same learning experience rather than

the mere selection of resources from a single museum or science centre.

At the moment, the OSR portal includes 138 educational pathways. These educational

pathways are divided into two categories. Structured pathways address formal education

needs and open pathways are designed to implement cases of informal learning. OSR

Pathways provide educators with a complete set of instructions, guidelines and supporting

materials (useful links, articles, worksheets etc.) organized in separate sections so as to guide

the educators to organize step-by-step a visit to a museum or science centre as efficiently as

possible. In order to make these visits more effective for learners, the pathways (in

particular the structured pathways) have a three-step organization, as follows:

• Pre-Visit Phase: preparing for the visit and getting acquainted with the subject

at hand.

• Visit Phase: involving interaction with digital science learning resources and

exhibits at science museum/centre.

• Post-Visit Phase: activities rounding up and concluding the learning

experience, after the visit to the museum/centre.

In each phase of a pathway, the author may attach numerous files like images, presentations

or worksheets as supporting materials. All supporting materials can be linked to the

respective text just like any other external link and thus helping the user to deploy the

supporting materials more easily.


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Figure 2: View of the “Propose preliminary explanation or Hypothesis” step in the pre-visit phase of a

structured pathway. All the supporting materials are listed below the respective text and are also

linked to the text.

A. Structured Pathways

The organization of the different phases of structured pathways is based on the Inquiry

based teaching model adjusted to implement visits to science museum/centres. More

specifically the phases of a structured pathway are illustrated in figure 3 below. In the OSR

authoring tool, which is used by the author to upload the pathway, there are respective

explanations concerning the content of each phase.

Figure 3: The organization of the different stages of a structured pathway.


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The topics of the structured pathways are all related to the school curriculum, covering

science subjects from all secondary education levels. Physics subjects like the

electromagnetic spectrum and optics in general as well as biology topics like genetics are

among the most popular among users. The collection of the OSR portal includes pathways

related to all kinds of exhibits, implementing the teaching of topics that are considered to be

quite difficult for students. For example, through the OSR portal, teachers can use Foucault’s

pendulum to teach their class about circular motion, or a replica of a DNA molecule to teach

them about connections among atoms.

B. Open Pathways

A museum educator/science communication professional, or even an experienced,

motivated end-user, selects digital learning objects and combines them to form a

meaningful, self-contained, user-friendly informal learning experience; this is the idea

behind the Open Pathway of OSR. The integration of resources scattered in various science

museums/centres into the same learning experience is a priority (as opposed to the

selection of resources from a single source, which can be the approach chosen in the case of

a structured pathway), offering to the visitor a unique informal learning experience.


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3.4 Open Science Resources Educational Content

Figure 4: The OSR Repository facilities allow users to search for educational content and learning

activities, as well as to upload their own content in order to share it with others and to develop their

own learning activities.

In the OSR repository, users can search for educational content in the form of learning

objects or educational pathways through the “Explore OSR” section or upload their own

materials, using the “Share your Content” section.

Users can also have access to the OSR repository through mobile phones

and PDA’s. Access through mobile phones is especially useful, as museum

visitors have the opportunity to use the content from the portal during

their visit to various exhibits. Moreover, the MoOSR section currently

includes 4 applications in English and in Greek that are especially designed

to be used through mobile phones. Six more mobile applications are

expected to be uploaded soon. The applications are designed in html

format removing the obstacle of Flash and its incompatibility with the i-

Phone and i-PAD.


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OSR aspires to be a single access point for the digital collections of the museums and science

centers across Europe and therefore it has to be a truly cross platform application. After the

introduction of mobile OSR for smart phones and PDAs, the consortium decided to capitalise

on the popularity of online virtual worlds and introduced OSR in Second Life (SL). Visitors can

visit the island of Ellinogermaniki Agogi in SL and experience the OSR content starting with

the Foucault’s pendulum application. Foucault’s pendulum is the first application available in

SL with more to follow.

Figure 5: By using Second Life, users may visit Foucault’s pendulum at the OSR area in Ellinogermaniki

Agogi’s island and learn about Foucault’s experiment, watch related videos as well as observe various

images illustrating pendulums around the world.

The OSR consortium understands that the numerous and diverse content available in the

repository can overwhelm the visitor, especially educators who plan to use OSR resources in

their lecture and to design learning activities. For this reason, the consortium developed

guidelines for the teacher (http://www.osrportal.eu/en/node/94441), sample worksheets

for the students, as well as references and supporting information for a plethora of

educational content. Moreover the repository’s interface is designed in the most user

friendly way with much information available to the user (see Figure 6).


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Figure 6: This figure indicates the information provided in the OSR portal for every educational

pathway and learning object.

Some very interesting data signifying the potentiality of the OSR repository is presented

below. The content data available at this point in time of the development of OSR are very

optimistic. They present the growth of the repository (see figure7 and 8, table 1), the quality

of the learning objects and educational pathways (figure 9) and clearly demonstrate that

users have not only become aware of the existence of the OSR portal but are embracing it

and using it in capacity (figure 10a and 10b).

Title

User Assessment Certification

Social Tags Taggers and Insert tag option

Educational Resources

Pathway Manipulation

IPR & Contributor

Object Metadata


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Figure 7: Content in the OSR Database May 2011.

Figure 8: OSR Repository Content Growth.

Content Type Current Number

Learning Objects 762

Structured pathways 95

Open pathways 43

mobile applications 4

Social Tags 5247

Table 1: Content in the OSR Repository.


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OSR Repository Object Quality Rating

Objects not rated48%

Objects rated 3 stars12%

Objects rated 2 stars and below

1%



Figure 9: OSR Content User Rating.


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Figure 10a: OSR Users.

OSR Users Activated in the Last Month

892, 92%

82, 8%

Active Registered Users Accounts Activated User Accounts in the Last Month

Figure 11b: OSR Users.


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Figure 12: Users Contributing Content in the OSR Repository. 281 users out of 974 have contributed

some form of content.

Some more interesting data regarding the language that the content was created and the

age range that is suitable for, are presented in the following graphs (figure 12 and 13):

Figure 13: Number of Items per Language including those available in two or more languages.


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Figure 14: Distribution of Content by Age –Range.

The type of content in the repository is also interesting. In the OSR repository, the learning

objects can be in many forms such as text, images, videos, applications, web links, web

content, collections and more. Their distribution and nature are presented in figure 14

below:

Figure 15: Types of Content.


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The educational content of the OSR portal is not only being characterized by the author but

also from all users of the portal through the tagging system of the portal. This tagging system

allows users to characterize any learning object or educational pathway they want by using

either free terms or by choosing from a pre-defined list of terms referring to the educational

objectives of the content. Some interesting data regarding social tagging of the OSR content

are presented below in figure 15.

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 4 2 4 3 2 6 5 3 2 3 4 10 20 15 9 28 73

Nu

mb

er

of

Ta

gs

Number of Users

Number of Tags added per Contributing User

Figure 16: Number of tags added per contributing user. It is of interest to notice that one user has

added 1157 tags another one 527 while the majority (73 users) have added only 1 tag.

The extreme distribution of the number of tags for one user comes from the fact that this

particular account is from a museum curator form Ciencia Viva in Portugal who tagged all

the objects that she uploaded.

Another very important quantitative measurement gained from analysing the type of social

tags is that the majority of taggers attributed free tags to the objects. The distribution of the

type of tags added to content by users is presented in the following figure 16 and 17.


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Figure 17: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository without Free Tags.

Figure 18: Number of Social Tags per type in the OSR Repository.


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0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 3 7 5 7 5

10

12

14

37

17

53

55

95

13

2

12

5

10

6

10

2

12

8

Nu

mb

er

of

Ta

gs

Number of Objects

Number of Tags per Object

Figure 19: Number of Tags per Learning Object. The majority of objects have 4 tags or fewer.

The consortium is fortunate to have as partners museums and science centers that have

digital material of unsurpassed quality. A small example of the material that is available to

the repository is presented below together with an example of their combination in a

structured educational pathway.


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3.5 Examples of Learning Objects available

Figure 19: The Collections for Human Physiology from Ciencia Viva.


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Figure 20: The Collections from Eugenides Foundation on light.


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Figure 21: The Collections from La Cite on climate and pollution.


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Figure 22: An extract from the structured educational pathway of the History of Atom.

The first page of the pathway with

the description and metadata


33

A brief introduction describing the

content and setting the context of

the pathway.

The Pre-Visit phase of the

pathway following the Inquiry

Based Science Education model of

learning.


34


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4 Targeted Users and Activities

This section provides a summary of the specificities of the OSR main user groups and

explains how the project addresses them through targeted activities.

The user requirement collection activities were continued during the second year of the

project in parallel to the starting of the validation activities. 14 workshops were arranged by

eight science centre/museum partners to complement the workshops already carried out in

the first year; those included 2 workshops for teachers, 8 workshops for students and 4 for

the general public visitors of the museums. The requirement gathering for the second year

brought 274 new students and 788 general visitors to the requirements user base. The

expectations (200 users) for year 1 were well exceeded.

Once the technologies were in place and partners were given the guidelines for the user

requirement and validation workshops, the project gathered a wealth of data to support the

requirements analysis and validation. In the second year of the project, the OSR

requirement/validation workshops targeted informal learners specifically, in order to fulfil

the project’s objectives and focus on having a well founded vision of the user base’s needs.

Participation and organization of dissemination events has been efficient and the objectives

for the first year were met and exceeded. Although many users in the OSR portal seem to be

coming from Greece if you observe the Google Analytics of the portal (see figure 23), this is

not surprising if we consider that three of the partners organizing events and activities with

users (Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Eugenides Foundation, Lambrakis Foundation) are based in

Greece and that the summer schools on the OSR project are held in Greece. After the first

year, the visits to the OSR portal coming from the technical partners have been excluded

from the Google Analytics report, therefore these figures have also been corrected and they

now show a more accurate analysis of the OSR portal’s user base. The average time of the

portal was 9:20 minutes and the visits had increased from year 1 (4802 visits from 69

countries -> 11 569visits from 100 countries). 56% of the users were recurring, which shows

that OSR users keep on coming back to work with the portal.

Out of the 11569 single visits, about 329 are coming through mobile devices. Although the

PDA version of the portal is currently in the last stages of preparation, we can observe that

these mobile users are spending about 3, 5 minutes on the portal, which means that there is

a need for the PDA and those users seem highly motivated to use the OSR portal.


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Figure 23: number and origin of OSR portal page visits from February 2010 to May 2011.


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5 Impact & Sustainability

This section highlights the first results from the study of the impact of the OSR activities and

measures taken to ensure the project’s sustainability.

5.1 OSR Impact to the target groups

The OSR consortium is organising and categorizing with metadata a rich collection of existing

resources from science centres and museums across Europe. The collection includes

numerous web based materials, guidelines for the realization of both physical and virtual

educational field trips (connected to the school curriculum or more open), lesson plans and

relevant educational materials, professional development and training materials,

educational projects and activities for schools, families and individuals, digital images of

exhibits, videos and animations of physical phenomena and instructional descriptions and

thousands of electronic publications on topics ranging from everyday science topics to issues

concerning scientific research.

The OSR users’ community counts 970 active content contributors, including 800 science

teachers and 170 museum educators. This community is developing in the framework of

user-centered activities (training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are

organised by the consortium members in the framework of the project’s implementation.

The main aim of the project and of the approach developed in OSR is to bridge the gap

between formal and informal science learning and to contribute to the development of a

strong community of science teachers and museums educators that would be able to

collaborate more effectively. In the following paragraphs we describe the impact of the

project’s implementation at the end of the second year.

5.2 Impact to the school Communities

The OSR Educational Design facilitates the following:

• Organisation of digital resources of the museums and science centres

according to the school curriculum and to specific teaching models. Teachers

consider the connections to the curriculum as the most important parameter

for the effective use of the materials in the school practice. To learn science in

meaningful ways, students need to see connections to familiar problems

which are relevant and important in their daily lives. Learning processes in

this framework are embedded in communicative situations, where teaching

science offers good conditions for fostering communication and cooperation

in students' experimental practices. For a content orientation the planned

teaching topics should be based on a broad field of knowledge and

application. To be effective, the teaching sequences should build up in a way

that student knowledge can increase and link to, in other words be

“constructed” by them.


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• Integration of field trips to the school activities. The OSR user group has

already developed about 138 educational pathways (this number was

expected at the end of the third year of the project). This fact demonstrates

that the approach as well as the user friendliness of the tools offers to the

teachers a unique opportunity to use the digital resources in their classroom.

Additionally, situated learning fosters the ability to transfer acquired

knowledge to a variety of different situations. Situated learning is an essential

component of acquiring the ability for self-organized and self-regulated

learning. Ideally, schools should provide opportunities for the development of

a competence to learn and an ability to be an autonomous learner in the

future. This includes the development of meta-cognitive learning

competencies like e.g. elaboration strategies or learning strategies and their

application and usefulness.

• Introduction of IBSE activities in the school curriculum. The use of the IBSE

model in the design of the Structure Educational Pathway template has

offered to the OSR team the opportunity to integrate the OSR case into the

general framework of the science education reform that is taking place in

many European countries. According to IB pedagogy, teaching should be

guided by a holistic planning process that takes the students' learning

processes, the subject matter and the teaching methods into account.

Students' orientation is a very important and significant variable that

correlates positively with students' performance. It offers students the chance

to link the information presented to their prior experience and knowledge.

Students have the chance to engage in an active and self-guided learning

process. Consequently, effective learning processes should be designed with

student's prior experience and knowledge.

• Promotion of resource based learning. The project is accelerating the

adoption of digital resources, in particular with a view to improve their use

and integration in national curricula, through an approach that is based on

stimulating demand by users.

• Effective community building between teachers and teachers and museum

educators. The OSR users’ community includes 970 active content

contributors, including 800 science teachers and 170 museum educators. This

community is developing in the framework of user-centered activities

(training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are organised by the

consortium members in the framework of the project’s implementation.

Many of the educational pathways have been developed jointly by teachers

and museum educators. Many training workshops are organised for both

groups. The OSR summer and winter schools are bringing together teachers

and museum educators to work together, exchange best practices and to

reflect on each other’s approach and methods.

The statements above are supported by the validation work, the implementation of a series

of proof of concept experiments and the web analytics of the portal.


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5.3 Impact to the Museum Visitors

OSR aspires to create an innovative framework that seamlessly integrating formal and

informal education, enhancing access to the numerous science educational resources of the

science museums and centres through a more participatory and highly distributed way to

augment museums’ institutional documentation with content that reflects the perspectives

and the interests of their communities. In this way, the OSR approach:

• Facilitates Lifelong Learning: Enriching the repertoire of learning

opportunities. Museum visitors have the chance to add their contributions to

the science centres and museums’ collections and to use educational

materials that could enrich their learning opportunities. For the public as a

whole, the resources of science centers and museums are a source of

information on contemporary technological and scientific developments.

• Encouraging active user interaction with the content. The big challenge for

science museums and centres is to capture the huge market of potential web

visitors and materialize it into physical visitors and/or long-term relationships

with the science museum community. This will allow science museums and

science centres to collaborate on the large scale while achieving

unprecedented synergies.

• Participatory exhibition design. The OSR approach could support the work of

the science museum design and development team to innovate the

exhibition. The explanatory and additional materials currently accompanying

the exhibits are produced for general used and they are presented to all the

different visitors’ categories. Social tagging could enable a departure from the

authored voice of the museum and, through the distributed contribution of

many individuals, the construction of additional means to access the

exhibition and the relevant content. As the number of social tags is increasing

significantly day by day, the OSR team will have the chance to analyze the

impact of this process to the exhibition design.

5.4 Impact to the Museum Educators

The use and the implementation of tools like OSR is a challenging task for museum

educators. The introduction of formalism (e.g. curriculum issues, metadata standards) is not

always understandable from many museums educators who are used to the high degree of

freedom offered by the museum setting. The OSR team is making a large effort to

demonstrate the benefits of such an organization scheme.

• Proposing a uniform way for the organisation and presentation of the digital

content of museums. From the work-to-date it is clear that a uniform

standardization approach is needed to assist science museums and centres in

retrofitting educational resources to fit the theoretical learning object

structure, while also ensuring that, as digital libraries scale up, newly


41

developed objects can be added. Such a uniform standardization process is

possible when science education digital libraries synergize to share and

critique metadata schemes to arrive at better educational metadata

standards.

• Innovative methods for assessing the impact of the exhibition design. Through

a series of proof of concept experiments, the OSR team aims to demonstrate

a new way to receive visitors’ feedback during the field trips in the museum

or in the science centre. Initial data from the social tagging process

demonstrate that this method could be effectively used to assess the impact

on visitors. For a selected sample of exhibits, very simple flash applications

were prepared including a short knowledge test. About 300 visitors have used

their mobile devices to provide feedback to the system while visiting the

exhibition. These data form a very good basis for future analysis of impact

assessment.

• Presenting Innovative methods for interacting with the visitors. Through web-

based, remote access applications, museum artefacts can be offered online to

engage diverse audiences in innovative learning experiences. Web services

have been made more widely available thanks to the mass take-up of

broadband technologies. Science centres and museums websites now

incorporate a range of media including virtual environments, 3D views, 360°

panoramic images, live webcams, animations, zoomable images, video,

interactive maps and timelines, etc. Various approaches of science content

presentation over the web are followed by the different science museums.

There are no other institutions that could take on the responsibility of

bringing democracy to technology. Completely opening up to digitalization

will probably be a difficult step for museums to take, as they will be laying

themselves open to criticism and controversy, but it will be a way for them to

be part of contemporary society. Normally science museums have very large

collections and these collections provide inspiration for further research. This

research gives insight into new knowledge that in turn inspires new

exhibitions. This is the renewal process in a museum. A new artefact implies

new research, which gives new stories to tell to the visitors. In this way,

museums have an unlimited source of new exhibitions for their visitors. What

it is needed in the world of science centers is a coordinated international

research and development programme, for innovating new science

communication tools and methods. According to Asger Høeg, President of

Ecsite (2003-2007), this research will be the mechanism for renewing the

science centers. Science Centers must be perceived as a “Gateway” for all to

access science on a more informal level.

• Allows for cross-institutional collaboration. Most of the OSR Educational

Pathways provide a connection between collections from different museums.

Cité des Sciences, the Museo de la Scienza “Leonardo da Vinci” and the

Deutsches Museum are collaborating effectively for the development of such

model pathways that could be used as reference for future developments.

The work focuses on the remote collaboration on educational pathways

merging complementary resources on a common subject.


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• Effective community building between museum educators and museum

educators and teachers. The OSR users’ community includes 970 active

content contributors, including 800 science teachers and 170 museum

educators. This community is developing in the framework of user-centered

activities (training seminars, presentations, demonstrations) that are

organised by the consortium members in the framework of the project’s

implementation. Many of the educational pathways have been developed

jointly by teachers and museum educators. Many training workshops are

organised for both groups. The OSR summer and winter schools are bringing

together teachers and museum educators to work together, exchange best

practices and to reflect on each other’s approach and methods.

5.5 Sustainability of the OSR approach

One key aim of the OSR project is to produce a sustainable solution for educational

resources for science learning and teaching. This is the preliminary plan after 24 months of

work on the project and it will be adjusted during the last year of the project after further

discussions among the consortium.

5.6 Sustainability of the portal

The OSR portal will be maintained by Elinogermaniki Agogi after the project ends in the

spring of 2012. The portal will be run in a similar manner as it has been during the project.

However, at this point we don’t envision any technological enhancements to the portal after

the end of the project.

5.7 Sustainability of the OSR services

The pathway and metadata authoring tools will still be available after the project ends, along

with the social tagging tool. The quality review of the resources will still be done

automatically for all the trusted organizations, such as the project partners. Furthermore,

the user-based quality review mechanisms such as the rating and commenting tool will still

be in place to provide insights for the future users of the portal.

5.8 Sustainability of the OSR user base

In the third year of the project, the consortium will draw a sustainable plan to enrich the

user base of the OSR portal by disseminating results with future activities and projects that

the consortium will come across. This plan will be fully introduced with the final deliverables

of the project.

The OSR Deliverable 7.4 “Roadmap - Towards a Standardized Science Resources (re-)usability

approach (final version)” will also present a sustainability plan of the OSR portal for the years

following the end of the project.


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Documents

Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045 4_OSR Second Annual Report_final.pdf · the “OSR Q&A”, meant to help all users easily familiarize with the OSR project, and the “OSR