Objective
eCOLOURS was a feasibility project involving Ministries of Education, leading educational content developers and a major educational content repository. It addressed the needs of a European educational content industry that remains fragmented and has been slow to develop cross-border approaches to co-production and localisation. By conducting experiments in cross-border co-development and localisation, the project developed a small number of learning resources and evaluated these with teachers.
A key aim in the project was to identify roadblocks to collaborative, cross-border development and to make recommendations concerning how these roadblocks and inhibitors can be overcome. Consequently, a systematic, in-depth analysis was made of the pedagogical, design, technical, multilingual and business issues that currently inhibit cross-border content development/localisation. Special attention was paid to IPR and licensing issues that needed to be addressed in order for collaborative approaches to co-development and localisation to take off.
Based on this analysis, the project proposed a set of services that could: firstly, support different types of cross-border collaboration; and secondly, provide an initial business model to help Ministries realise the concept of "a European network of educational content clearinghouses" as proposed by the Hungarian Ministry of Education.