PROPOSAL PART B

ICT PSP fifth call for proposals 2011

Best Practice Network

ICT PSP Objective identifier: 2.3 Raising awareness of Europeana and promoting its use (delete as applicable)

Proposal acronym: E4E

Proposal full title: Europeana For Education

Proposal draft number and date of preparation: V2.0 24 May 2012

Name of coordinating person: David Massart

List of participants:

Participant no.*	Participant organisation name	Participant short name	Country
1 (Co-ordinator)	EUN Partnership AISBL	EUN Partnership AISBL	EUN
2 (Participant)	Europeana Foundation	STICHTING EUROPEAN DIGITAL LIBRARY	Europeana
3 (Participant)	MDR partners Ltd	MDR partners Ltd	MDR
4 (Participant)	EUROCLIO - European Association of History Educators	EUROCLIO - European Association of History Educators	Euroclio
5 (Participant)	University of Wolverhampton	University of Wolverhampton	UoW
6 (Participant)		ATIT BVBA	ATiT
7 (Participant)	University of Vigo	Universidad de Vigo	UVIGO
8 (Participant)	SMART Technologies (Germany) GmbH	SMART Technologies (Germany) GmbH	SMART
9 (Participant)		Stichting DEN	DEN
10 (Participant)	Federal Ministry for Education, Art and Culture	Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur	BMUKK
11 (Participant)	Ministry of Education and Culture	Ministry of Education and Culture	MoEC
12 (Participant)	UNI•C, the Danish IT Centre for Education and Research	UNI-C DANMARKS EDB-CENTER FOR UDDANNELSE OG FORSKNING	UNI-C
13 (Participant)	Ministry of Education, Directorate for Science and Technology		Digital Heritage UK
14(Participant)	National Agency to support Innovation and Research in education	INDIRE ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DI DOCUMENTAZIONE PER L'INNOVAZIONE E LA RICERCA EDUCATIVA	INDIRE
15 (Participant)	Ministry of Education and Science, Centre of Information Technologies of Education	Švietimo ir mokslo ministerija, Švietimo informacinių technologijų centras	ITC
16 (Participant)	General Directorate of Innovation and Curricular Development	Direcção Geral de Inovação e Desenvolvimento Curricular do Ministério da Educação	DGIDC
17(Participant)	Slovak University of Technology		SUT
18 (Participant)	National Center for pedagogical documentation	Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique	CNDP
19 (Participant)			EduCentrum
20 (Participant)	INTERDISCIPLINARY INSTITUTE FOR BROADBAND TECHNOLOGY		IBBT

*Please use the same participant numbering as that used in proposal submission forms A2.

Abstract

"Europeana offers teachers and students the opportunity to source quality digital learning objects that will enhance teaching and learning. These resources will increase the confidence of the teaching profession in using online material and allow students to represent their knowledge in a format that is meaningful to them within the context of what is required in the 21st century[1]."

Europeana For Education (E4E) aims to raise awareness of the value of Europeana and to establish its use by pupils and teachers across Europe, utilising the mechanism of a Best Practice Network.

Europeana offers a unique learning resource for education in Europe. It provides trusted content from the cultural institutions of Europe and from experts who have collected, organised, catalogued and interpreted Europe’s scientific and cultural heritage over a very long period of time. This content is, therefore, potentially very suitable for teaching and learning in subject disciplines such as arts, humanities, science, languages and other subjects.

During 2010 Europeana carried out a series of workshops with its main stakeholder groups to determine the main value propositions that Europeana is offering end-users, content providers, market players and politicians. Wide use of Europeana in education by school children was ranked very high both by both politicians and content providers. For the former, the use of Europeana is seen as a means to strengthen a common European identity through the understanding of the shared past and the reinforcement of the sense of European citizenship. For content providers who have the mandate to disseminate knowledge about cultural heritage, school children are amongst their main target groups. All Europeana content providers consider servicing the educational sector in their country as one of their main responsibilities. However, current use of materials in this way is still in an embryonic stage. E4E aims to mainstream the resources and to encourage the development and sharing of teaching materials across Europe.

End-users and in particular pupils value Europeana for the trustworthiness of the information they can find and which they can safely re-use in school projects. Market players and in particular publishers also see Europeana as a pool of content through which new educational products can be developed and disseminated to learning groups.

By July 2011, Europeana will provide access to over 16 million cultural and scientific heritage digital items (text, images, sound and moving images) from over 1,500 European cultural institutions and this number will double over time. It has contacts with most of the Ministries of Culture in the EU member states and some of the Ministries of Education.

There is evidence that access to suitable cultural heritage resources does not currently match the demand in education. For example, a Belgian study found that:”On all levels of education and in all education forms, only 20 to 30 % of the respondents state that they find enough information from the sector with regard to the use of cultural heritage resources"[2]

Many of the digital objects accessible through Europeana are potentially useful for school age learners across a wide spectrum of curriculum topics. However, they are currently not described, linked or packaged in ways that support their retrieval and use for educational purposes.

Many thousands of schools are currently engaged in European Schoolnet (EUN) projects and initiatives (iTEC, Insafe, myEurope, Spring Day for Europe, Learning Resource Exchange, etc.) and in the European Commission’s eTwinning initiative (132,000 active members) for which EUN provides the Central Support Service.

However, at both national and European level, schools currently have a limited awareness of Europeana or how they can exploit this huge pool of cultural heritage content for teaching and learning. In addition, Europeana content cannot at present be accessed by schools using the EUN Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service for schools or from within national content portals provided by Ministries of Education.

Part of the challenge is that both Europeana and EUN’s Learning Resource Exchange currently operate in ‘parallel universes’. While Europeana and the EUN share a common vision for bringing cultural heritage content into education, Europeana and the LRE have been funded under different European Commission programmes and have developed technical infrastructures and ways of describing their resources and digital assets with metadata that currently constrain interoperability. A Best Practice Network project is now required in order to ensure a greater degree of technical and semantic interoperability between Europeana and the EUN LRE so that schools across Europe can more easily find and exploit Europeana content, alongside a more general raising of awareness of the possibilities in the school education sector.

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[1] Statement made by Donal O'Mahony, an Irish teacher who developed the History Matters blog together with his students from the Pormarnock Community School. The blog about Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, William Shakespeare, Rembrandt van Rijn and other key historical figures won a Europeana-sponsored eLearning Award for excellent use of technology in education in 2010. He added that the History Matters project was not just about studying the past. "It's also about teaching digital responsibility and improving digital literacy. One of the key aspects in this regard is being attentive to the quality of online material, some of which has dubious provenance."

[2] From: Van der Auwera, S., Schramme, A., Universiteit Antwerpen, Jeurissen, R., Xios Hogeschool Limburg. "Erfgoededucatie in het Vlaamse onderwijs - Erfgoed en onderwijs in dialoog" 2007, CANON Cultuurcel, Kunsten en Erfgoed, VIOE, Brussels, Belgium (page 118)

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