Hagen (GER), March 2009 - CampusContent, the DFG (German Research Foundation) Center of Excellence for eLearning has launched "edu-sharing" for the education sector. As opposed to other repository solutions throughout the EU, CampusContent largely supports protected cooperation among communities of colleagues and experts.
The step-by-step connection of edu-sharing will make the content of existing networks, such as Ariadne and European Schoolnet, available on edu-sharing. The possibility of granting specific access rights to invited colleagues has attracted a lot of interest, especially in the school and university sectors.
edu-sharing is interesting for communal data centers that often support different learning platforms for several hundred schools and would like to network these with each other. Universities often use several learning-management systems, which has proven to be a barrier to the exchange of learning content, media, and learning scenarios in the past. Publishing houses, radio, TV, and other content providers can offer content to the education facilities that are connected to the network via various licenses.
The repository software and optional authoring tools will be provided as open source. Users can install a self-contained repository for their own facility; however, it is desired that the repositories be connected to the edu-sharing network.
Alfresco, a very successful and widespread open source document-management system, was chosen as the basic repository software system. This ensures stability and performance to edu-sharing users, as Alfresco has a large developer, service, and user community. Alfresco provides interfaces to many IT systems, including MS Office® programs. Alternatively, instead of the Community version, users can use the Enterprise Service of the Alfresco partner network.
During 2009, service partners will be certified and listed for all the other modules, such as the Onyx testing and evaluation system from the German State of Saxony's education portal and for the Chameleon authoring system from metacoon.
The edu-sharing network launches with pilot partners in spring. During the pilot phase, technologies and user interfaces will be optimized, and the network organization and content licensing processes will be coordinated. In autumn, the software and community model will be published, and content providers and other repository networks will be connected to edu sharing.
