EU project develops interoperable smart space for learning
An EU project consortium has announced that it has moved one step closer to making a reality of an interoperable smart space for learning in Europe. ELENA is an Information Society Technologies (IST) project, funded under the Fifth Framework Programme (FP5). The project has a total budget of nearly four million euro and includes partners from four Member States, as well as Slovenia and Iceland. Its aim is to develop an educational service network, consisting of learning assessment tools, learning management systems, educational (meta) repositories and live delivery systems such as video conferencing systems. The ELENA project has recently reached the first milestone in its work agenda: it has developed a peer-to-peer network (P2P), linking the two instances of the already established UNIVERSAL brokerage service for the exchange and distribution of learning resources among educators and trainers. Progress has also been made in connecting other educational management systems so that users can be kept up to date on events and novelties in the world of education. Users are being invited to test the network guidelines from the project's website. Users are also requested to provide feedback and contributions on the project's specifications and prototypes. The project consortium is hopeful that developing a learning network in such a way will 'provide an advantage for all learners by offering them the choice amongst a variety of knowledge sources.' 'ELENA prepares the ground for the rise of educational service markets and new service value chains, which will allow institutions to treat the performance of educational services as a make or buy decision,' explains the consortium.
Kraje
Austria, Germany, Greece, Spain, Iceland, Slovenia