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IMPLEMENTATION OF COLLABORATION MANAGEMENT IN NETWORKING EDUCATIONAL AND METHODICAL COMMUNITY
УДК 330.47 + 37.022 + 004.9
Nikolai Gorbatchev
Minsk Branch of MESI, Deputy Director
Mikalai Malchenko
Minsk Branch of MESI, Deputy Director
http://www.mfmesi. ru
E-mail: minpred@mesi.ru
Larisa Shushkevich
Minsk School No. 54, Teacher of Informatics E-mail: shulm@tut.by
This report includes brief theoretical analysis of the following issues: Web 2.0 educational technologies for the development of educational communities networking: increasing the mobility and collaboration; sustainable development of networking educational and methodical communities and the limits of effective growth. Outlines of advantages provided by application of networking community approach to continuous learning is illustrated with an example of school teachers professional competencies' permanent upgrading in the networking community for the implementation of interactive educational facilities
Keywords: networking community, collaboration, life-long (continuous) learning, knowledge domain modeling, content creation and updating.
Николай Николаевич Горбачёв
к.э.н., Минский филиал МЭСИ, заместитель директора
Николай Сергеевич Мальченко
к.хим.н., Минский филиал МЭСИ, заместитель директора http://www.mfmesi. ru Эл. почта: minpred@mesi.ru
Лариса Михайловна Шушкевич
учитель информатики СШ №54 г. Минска Эл. почта: shulm@tut.by
ОПЫТ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ СОВМЕСТНОЙ РАБОТОЙ В СЕТЕВОМ УЧЕБНО-МЕТОДИЧЕСКОМ СООБЩЕСТВЕ
В статье приводится краткий анализ перспектив использования технологий Web 2.0 для развития сетевых учебно-методических сообществ в части повышения мобильности и развития средств совместной работы; устойчивого развития сетевых сообществ и предела их эффективного роста. Выявленные в результате анализа преимущества сетевых сообществ внедрены и используются для управления сетевым сообществом учителей по использованию интерактивных средств обучения и развития их компетенций.
Ключевые слова: сетевое сообщество, совместная работа, образование в течение всей жизни, моделирование предметной области, создание и актуализация контента.
1. Introduction
Sustainable development of education system requires harmonic inclusion of contemporary results of scientific and technical progress into educational process for development of students' personalities. Intensive development of educational technologies requires the improving of the competences of both learners (students, pupils) and educators (lecturers, teachers). Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) provide the technical base for the development of personal knowledge using community networking methods and the concept of social networks for the educational experience sharing [6].
The implementation of information-communication technologies (ICT) and Web 2.0 toolsets into the educational process has caused the increase of collaboration models application for the creation and updating of universities' educational and methodical content. In many cases, educational content includes the results of joint creative work of many educators, as well as students and third-party reviewers, which improve the initial content in the course of studying (discovering the discrepancies with other information resources, suggesting available alternative knowledge sources, updating the content corresponding to the results of contemporary scientific research, etc.)
Permanent data, information and knowledge exchange in the course of communication in educational communities via forums, social networks, video conferencing leads to the content volume increase. Such content may be referred to as "prospective educational information resources" as it can potentially be used in content management systems for the electronic courses creation or updating.
Thus, the following items became the strategic tasks in creation of electronic courses for universities:
-Providing the high level of relevance, reliability and efficiency of access to available educational content for the participants of educational process with the possibility to choose alternative knowledge sources;
-Determining the adequacy and value of educational content for development of required competencies;
-Appropriate systematization of prospective educational information resources generated by educational communities.
This paper includes an example of collaboration management in the following educational communities established by Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics (MESI): school teachers professional competencies' permanent upgrading in the networking community for the implementation of interactive educational facilities, which has been initiated within the framework of the regional competition "IT-region: MINSK.EDU.BY" in Belarus (technical platforms - Moodle, Share-PointLMS, Moodle; technical support - Minsk Branch of MESI, Minsk Municipal Institute for Development of Education, BelITSoft; methodical support - Minsk Branch of MESI).
2. Web 2.0 technologies for the development of educational communities networking: increasing the mobility and collaboration
Forecast of the electronic educational services market development up to 2014 prepared by Ambientinsight [2]
2002 - 2004 - self-practice content for e-learning.
2005 - 2007 - self-practice content for e-learning with the implementation of collaborative technologies, virtual mentoring, virtual classrooms and laboratories.
2008 - 2011 - mobile content delivered with 3G networks to mobile devices, using interactive mobile applications based on real-time educational tasks.
2012 - 2014 - mobile content using technologies and instruments of collaborative practice, delivered with 4G networks to mobile devices; application of cloud computing facilities and cross-platform educational solutions; development of educational content involves personal experience of final users (tutors, students); modeling realtime educational problem situation with highly interactive mobile applications; personal aid to university content is indicated in students' e-Portfolio used for personal
Djitn Source: Forecast of development of electronic educational services market up to 2D 14 prepared by Ambientinsight Figure 1. Generations of educational content and estimated amount of end-users (according to AmbientInsight analysis)
Figure 2. Knowledge Management in Universities: From the Educational Management Processes Automation to the
Implementation of Knowledge Transfer Innovative Models
competencies promotion as well as universities' marketing tool.
Considering the change of generations described above the conceptual
shift from the educational management processes automation to the implementation of knowledge transfer innovative models becomes evident (fig. 2). E-learn-
ing using collaborative technologies and social networks is now set as a specific segment of educational services market with the forecast growth up to 28% from
all the e-learning services until 2013 [1].
The process of educational and methodical content creation and development within the networking community means individual activity of experience holders, sharing and publication of best practices, collaboration discussing of published practices, improving the initially published materials using collaboration toolsets by all the persons involved into community. Thus, the initial content is revised by many authors and appears as the result of joint creativity.
3. Managing the intellectual property of networking community as result of collective creativity
One of the most disputable issues of knowledge management is personification of authorship in networking communities. Current methods of organization of collaborative work with educational and methodical content in networking communities allows the personification of intellectual property at any stage of content creation. However, Web 2.0 technologies mean free voluntary exchange of available data, information and knowledge between the participants of networking community. Thus, the concept of knowledge alienation (sharing) was taken as the theoretical basis for knowledge management. Knowledge alienation is specific for knowledge economy and means one of methods of knowledge owner authority to dispose the components of their formalized and non-formalized information resources and their own
property. For the implementation of management functions over the intellectual property of networking community, knowledge alienation process may be arranged as follows:
- Personal knowledge alienation (between individuals);
- Collaboration knowledge alienation (inside or between the groups of individuals);
- Expert knowledge alienation (applying the external experts);
- Corporative knowledge alienation (applying corporative regulations);
- State knowledge alienation (applying state regulations).
Educational process appears as knowledge exchange between educators (lecturers, tutors) and students. Such exchange is organized in formal and nonformal educational communities. Major aims of networking educational community are: meeting the needs in personal competences developing based on work with internal and external knowledge sources; collective improvement of shared knowledge and application of community knowledge to the creation of educational and methodical content required by the educational market. However, in the course of educational networking community growth, the problem of managing the load of produced educational content becomes very important for its sustainable development.
4. Sustainable development of networking educational and methodical
communities and the limits of effective growth
Effective growth of educational networking community means quantitative and qualitative growth of amount of community members who are able to share their professional knowledge requested by the community for development of other members' personal competences.
In the context of networking educational community development and referring to the principles of sustainable development, it is required to provide effective cooperation with the other communities within the professional infrastructure. Coping with this requirement depends on cooperation with the other networking communities at the level of social networks (Figure 3)
Referring to the strategic tasks of universities described above, prospective information resources generated by networking communities should be appropriately managed for the sustainable development of the educational content. In Russia and Belarus the State regulates the minimal volume of students' competences. However, these regulations called "federal" or "state" educational standards have quite a long period of updating. Thus, educational content has to be balanced between the requirements of State and the requirements of labor market and students to the content of competences provided by educators.
We consider modeling of knowledge domains of networking communities as an
Persondl knowledge
Figure 3. Levels of interaction between the members of networking educational and methodical community in development of
personal competences
effective instrument of their sustainable development. Such models are integrated into ontology model of the university knowledge domain. Ontology has a structural role for educational content management using metadata for interdisciplinary integration. It also guides the students and educators in working with external knowledge sources. Ontology of university knowledge domain is based on state educational standards, however it is expandable and may be updated as often as required [7].
Another important role of ontology is management of personal competences of networking educational communities members. Setting the quantitative and qualitative relations between the units of ontology and personal aid of members of networking communities allows for discovering the most active experts in the requested fields of study. Additional metadata may be also used to describe specific educational information for designing the courses for students with disabilities [5].
Example 1: school teachers professional competencies' permanent upgrading in the networking community for the implementation of interactive educational facilities, initiated within the
framework of the regional competition "IT-region: MINSK.EDU.BY", Belarus
UNECE education strategy for sustainable development (ESD) stipulates that "educational process should permeate learning programmes at all levels, including vocational education, training for educators, and continuing education for professionals and decision makers" [4]. Intensive development of ICT requires instant training of most of specialists nowadays.
However, low financing of continuing education of school teachers in Belarus sometimes does not allow them to develop competences required for appropriate implementation of contemporary devices and computer applications. In order to assist the school teachers in using the ICT, Minsk Branch of MESI initiated the project of permanent upgrading the professional competencies of school teachers in networking community for the implementation of interactive educational facilities, which has been initiated within the frames of regional competition "IT-region: MINSK.EDU.BY" in Belarus. The proj ect was submitted to the national competition of educators "IT-region: MINSK.EDU.BY" in Belarus in 2011.
Technical platform was initially pro-
vided by Minsk Municipal Institute for Development of Education (MGIRO) using Moodle LMS. However, due to the limitations of the required toolkits, the community arranged a mirror using Share-PointLMS provided by BellTSoft Company (http://elearningsoft.ru). Methodical and technical support was provided by Minsk Branch of MESI. The selection of technical platforms was adjusted by the regulations of the competition.
The activity of networking educational community of school teachers from more than 15 schools had the following results:
- Web-site of networking community providing access to shared content for interactive boards;
- Master-classes on-line and webina-rs for school teachers sharing the best practices of application of interactive board at schools;
- On-line courses including updatable videocontent for developing the pedagogical competences of using the interactive boards at school;
- Discussions of suggested training tools and interactive content in forums and blogs of networking educational community;
- Improvement and updating of pub-
Figure 4. Screenshot of online master-class on pedagogical methods of application of interactive board for teaching the biology presented by V.V. Vernikovskaya, teacher of biology from School No.30 (Minsk, Belarus)
lished content in course of constructive debates at the web-site of community.
In order to provide the copyright protection, the community also publishes the DVD-copies of online courses as electronic edition.
In 2011 the networking community proceeded 4 webinars and over 19 master-classes online sharing the experience of application of interactive boards for teaching various curriculum disciplines (history, linguistics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, literature, informatics and programming). Webinars and master-classes were attended by representatives of schools from Belarus (including small cities and regional schools) and Russia (Belgorod, Kaliningrad, Ryazan, Tver, Yaroslavl) - see Figure 4.
In course of using the Moodle LMS, members of networking educational community have encountered the following limitations, due to which SharePointLMS (elearningsoft.ru) was taken as a mirror application platform:
1. Insufficiency of toolkits for educa-
tional and methodical content provided by Moodle LMS. Major aim of networking educational community is to produce updatable e-courses for continuous education of school teachers. Content development tools (WordForce, PowerPointForce, QuizForce) provided by SharePointLMS allowed for automation of content creation, collaborative reviewing and permanent updating; additionally, these tools have integrated SCORM converters for direct exporting to e-courses.
2. Absence of a full-functional webi-nar and web-conferencing system in Moodle LMS. Exchanging the best practices of using the interactive boards of various producers providing different software calls for the organization of a big amount of educational webinars presented by members of networking community. For example, in February-May, 2011 our networking community presented 15 webinars of using interactive boards in teaching of 10 disciplines of school curriculum. All webinars were recorded and presented for collaborative reviewing.
3. Limitations of Moodle in combining the SCORM-objects. Absence of technical possibility to integrate the basic SCORM courses into special courses, for example, refreshing the memories of students.
4. Absence of expanded statistics toolkits allowing the analysis of the networking educational community members activity: application of collaboration tools, participations in reviews, webinars, webconferences, activity in creative groups of the networking community, etc.) Analysis of these parameters lets us choose the most active persons taking into consideration all the diversity of educational and methodical content generated by the community.
5. Availability of direct connection between SharePointLMS and Microsoft Windows indexing service, which allows for using the metadata of objects from repository of networking community for the creation of e-courses and navigation between them.
6. Availability of multi-level organiza-
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Figure 5. Web-site of networking educational and methodical community of school teachers for implementing the interactive tools used for continuous learning (technical platform - Microsoft SharePoint Portal with SharePointLMS)
tional structure in SharePointLMS, allowing a member to take the role of the tutor (educator) in part of their advanced competences or the role of a student in those fields of study where new or additional knowledge or skill is required.
7. SharePointLMS provides workflow instruments required for collaborative work, including versioning, publications control, reviewing/approving, editing rights control, controlling the content updating schedule, etc.). These tools are extremely useful in case of working with big volumes of educational and methodical content.
8. Implementation of local and global e-libraries, thematically connecting the objects of repository of networking educational community. This facility improves the content actualization process using multiple publication of updates in all co-related e-courses using metadata.
Collaborative activity of networking educational and methodical community of school teachers (see Figure 5) produced the following results for its sustainable development:
- organization of collaborative creation of educational and methodical content for interactive boards (various models of boards, various software, various subjects of school curriculum);
- presenting and creative reviewing the best practices using community we-binars and web-conferences, attracting teachers from different regions and countries;
- publishing and updating the educational content generated by the community for updating the knowledge and skills in frames of continuous learning concept on the basis of Minsk Branch of Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics (MESI) and Minsk Municipal Institute for Development of Education;
- creation of repository of shared content for interactive boards for its exchange and collaborative improvement by educators.
Nowadays, networking educational and methodical community of school teachers established with support of Minsk Branch ofMESI acts as self-organized system with minor technical and methodical support from our side (Figure 6). Educational and interactive content is structured according to various models of interactive boards and software supplied by vendors.
Community includes research team, content design group, reviewers, moderators, technical support group.
Due to activity of members of net-
working community, webinar and open lessons demonstrating best pedagogical practices of application of interactive boards in teaching various curriculum disciplines were presented and published as electronic editions of DVD. This content is used for on-line and off-line versions of e-learning courses for continuous learning of school teachers in part of application of interactive boards.
5. Conclusion
This paper outlines the advantages provided by application of networking community approach to content creation and updating for sustainable development of the university. Suggested methods of content creation were approbated for continuous learning of school teachers at Minsk Branch of MESI and creation of interactive boards content.
In the result, the following major conclusions were made:
1. Creation of networking educational and methodical communities for development of personal skills of teachers and collaborative creation of educational content has confirmed its effectiveness. However, additional research is required for development of creative toolkits at the level of social networks. Main trends of such research are: development of analysis methods for effectiveness of collabo-
Figure 6. Results of activity of networking educational and methodical community of school teachers Экономика, Статистика и Информатика^ИэТ №6, 2011
ration between the groups of networking community; methodical content management tools using model of community knowledge domain for connecting the methods applicable to various disciplines; methods of personalization required for managing the profiles of members of networking community and maps of personal competences; research for evaluation and monetization of content created in the result of collaborative work of networking educational and methodical community.
2. In order to provide structuring of educational and methodical content in course of sustainable development of networking community, it is suggested to develop knowledge domain model in form of ontology [3] for appropriate actualization using multiple publication of content updates.
References
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Литература
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Forecast and Analysis, Ambient Insight, LLC. [Электронный ресурс]. Режим доступа: www.ambientinsight.com/Re-sources/Documents/ AmbientInsight_ US_2008-2013_LearningTechnology Market_ExecutiveOverview.pdf [Accessed: 21.10.2010]
3. Gorbachev N. and Greenberg A. University Knowledge Domain Application for Educational Content Updating. // Economics, Statistics, Informatics. - 2010. - Vol. 3. pp. 141 -147.
4. UNECE (2005), UNECE strategy for education for sustainable development. [Электронный ресурс]. Режим доступа:: http://www.unece.org/env/ documents/ 2005/cep/ac.13/cep.ac.13.200 5. 3.rev.1 .e.pdf [Accessed: 08.02.2011]
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