Learning Impact Awards & Recognition Program

The Learning Impact Awards and Recognition Program is an initiative of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) that acknowledges the use of technology to support or enhance learning. It features the highest levels of innovation, adoption, and evidence of improved learning. The Learning Impact Awards are unique for their recognition of the use of technology in context. The 2007 competition showcased 25 finalist and 12 Learning Impact Award winners at the Learning Impact 2007 & The Summit on Global Learning Industry Challenges Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

IMS Press Release

The IMS Press Release is now available; announcing the Australian Learning Impact Award Winners.

Winners

Congratulations to the Learning Impact Award winners. The following finalists will now represent Australia in the Global Learning Impact Awards to be held in Austin, Texas, May 12-15 2008:

Judging

Judging is based on criteria related to:
  • Access
  • Affordability
  • Quality
  • Adoption
  • Accountability
  • Organisational learning
  • Interoperability
  • Innovation
Judges:

Rob Abel - CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium
Graeme Dobbs - Independent Consultant
Dr. Elizabeth McDonald - Director, Grants Scheme, The Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Full judging criteria available at: http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2008/awards.html

Finalists

  1. Winner - Online Learning Environment
  2. First Runner Up - Schools Online Curriculum Services (SOCS)
  3. Second Runner Up - The Learning Federation
  4. edna Groups
  5. The Digital Learning Bank
  6. RMIT REZ (Resuable Educational Zoomable)
  7. Federated repository for vocational education and training
  8. OTEN Learning Support (OLS) website, OTEN
  9. SkillsPro Learning Plan Generator at TAFE NSW
  10. The Integrated Content Environment for Research and Scholarship - Improving the sustainability of research publications

Winner - Online Learning Environment

Organisation: The Learning Edge
Impact: Graduate School of Medicine, University of Wollongong

This nomination describes the Online Learning Environment (OLE) for the new Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Wollongong. It integrates the following elements:

The OLE gives students a single environment from which they can access all resources and functionality relevant to their study.

It facilitates the tagging of all educational content, from lecture outlines to eReadings, with the school's curriculum metadata schema (covering clinical problem, learning outcomes, specialties, and body systems). This in turn enables students to search for content from their entire course using specific metadata. For example, a fourth year student on clinical placement treating a patient with a bleeding ear will be able to search for all clinical demonstrations in the course that covered the ENT (ear, nose, throat) body system and the clinical problem 'Bleeding'.

The OLE plays a key role in facilitating the delivery and management of the school's innovative problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. The content tagging allows the academic team to create reports and visualisations highlighting where specific clinical problems, learning outcomes, specialties, and body systems are covered in the course. The LCMS' workflow functionality allows a wide range of academics to contribute content while also enabling academic leadership to quality assure that content.

Rather than developing a new environment, the team chose to integrate best-of-breed elements, with a minimum of effort and risk.

The environment contains elements which, individually, have been implemented elsewhere. Its key value is in bringing these together into an integrated whole, driven by an innovative educational design and not technology.

First Runner Up - Schools Online Curriculum Services (SOCS)

Organisation: Department of Education and Training, Western Australia
Impact: Western Australian teachers, students, administrators & wider community.

SOCS (Schools Online Curriculum Services) is an integrated suite of web-enabled enterprise products and services providing online teaching and learning, content management and search, collaboration, portal and curriculum information management. This 'one stop shop' for teachers, students, administrators and the wider community is being progressively made available by Western Australia's Department of Education and Training over a seven year period starting in 2005.

SOCS is built on a range of new and existing enterprise-class software packages underpinned by an unprecedented investment in hardware and network infrastructure and linked by both commercial and custom middleware and integration tools. Piloted with 17 schools in 2006 and independently evaluated, the main teacher and student-facing component of SOCS, the Online Teaching and Learning System (OTLS), has been rolled out to over 50 schools this year and an ambitious five-year implementation plan will see this system being made available to all 770 public schools in Western Australia by 2012.

The objectives of SOCS are to provide:

Second Runner Up - The Learning Federation

Organisation: Curriculum Corporation
Impact: Australian schools

The Learning Federation has developed and licensed a pool of over 6000 learning objects ranging from highly interactive content to file media files associated with education metadata. All content is distributed from the TLF central repository (TLF Exchange) as IMS content packages to school education jurisdictions across Australia and New Zealand. Each jurisdiction has implemented repositories and associated services to enable schools to view, download and contextualise the content within their teaching and learning programs. TLF has worked collaboratively with education jurisdictions and other education sectors to ensure that the TLF specifications reflect and interoperate with standards based systems.

edna Groups

Organisation: education.au limited
Impact: Australian education practitioners

Recognising the importance of collaboration among educators beyond normal organisational/jurisdictional boundaries, edna Groups was launched to provide practitioners with a place to form and develop communities of interest in a risk free environment among their peers. edna Groups also allows educators to trial new technologies in an environment where they can develop their expertise at their own pace. New technologies are available for them to evaluate to help determine whether these tools should be installed in their own environments.

The Digital Learning Bank

Organisation: EQUELLA - The Learning Edge International
Impact: Department of Education and Children's Services, South Australia

The Digital Learning Bank (DLB) is a new, secure internet based resource available to educators in all the schools and preschools within the Department of Education and Children's Services, South Australia (DECS). It hosts a wide range of high quality digital teaching and learning materials and easy-to-use tools for users to contribute, search, browse and retrieve materials to support their teaching and learning programs. Specially selected professional learning materials are also available for teachers and leaders.

The DLB contains over 6000 items of digital content. Over 2000 are digital learning objects from The Le@rning Federation. They are chunks of digital material e.g. graphics, text, audio, animation and interactive tools specifically designed to engage and motivate student learning. There are also over 3200 digital resources which are single items, e.g. moving image footage, photo, audio file, image, that include a description of its educational value. DECS content includes several hundred teaching, professional development and leadership resources and learning materials. These have been contributed from Access Media (the publishing house for the Open Access College), many DECS units and agencies, Outreach agencies and DECS teacher and student contributions. A collection of external websites, all with valuable teaching and learning resources, completes the content.

Content is discovered by browsing and/or searching, can either be referenced or downloaded and displayed along with its conditions of use, planning and technical information. Users can also provide feedback on the usefulness of any content and select a rating to assist others.

The Digital Learning Bank is powered by EQUELLA. Designed by educators, for educators, EQUELLA is a web-based Digital Repository that incorporates Learning Objects, Learning Content Management and integrated content authoring. EQUELLA has been implemented within over 60 institutions worldwide.

For the purposes of the implementation at the Department of Education and Children's Services South Australia, EQUELLA has been branded as the Digital Learning Bank

RMIT REZ (Reusable Educational Zoomable)

Organisation: Educational Media Group, RMIT University
Impact: School of Medical Sciences, RMIT University

RMIT REZ was designed to enable the management and annotation of high resolution images for use across a variety of courses and disciplines. The project evolved from a request to create a photographic library that documents the specimens of the RMIT Anatomy Museum. The museum itself comprises of around 140 specimens available for student study. Very few of the specimens were labelled prior to potting and where this had been done, was limited to coloured pins. Photographing the specimens resulted in a collection of over 500 images, showing every specimen from a range of perspectives. The REZ system evolved from the need to make this resource available to a wider audience. A key objective of this project was to enable registered users to add course specific annotations to images from the collection and to allow users to zoom into high-resolution versions of these annotated images.

Anatomy is taught to a wide audience at RMIT ranging from Nursing to Osteopathy and Chiropractic to Human Movement and Physical Education. The museum specimens represent a very valuable resource to students for study outside of formal practical sessions. The REZ project extends the value of the specimens both within their physical setting and beyond by allowing the students access to them anywhere and anytime with value added through labels and course specific quizzes.

All RMIT staff can use REZ to download images, create image annotations and to create quizzes simply by logging into the REZ Editor. Registered users are also able to create structured 'albums' that allow annotations and quizzes to be combined into themed resources.

At present, REZ enables academics to annotate images to be used as learning resources for instruction. However, in the near future REZ will be extended to allow students to annotate images as part of learning activities and research.

An introduction site is available with a working demo of the image annotation tool at: http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/museum/

Federated repository for vocational education and training

Organisation: Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) - http://www.www.flexiblelearning.net.au/lorn
Impact: Australian Flexible Learning Framework

LORN is a federated network of VET sector resources where learning objects are harvested from various repositories and exposed through a single search service. These learning objects are made available to end users through consumer access points (CAPs) that can access LORN's search service. Teachers and trainers are given access to over 2500 free online learning objects which they can preview, download, modify and use as required.

Learning objects available through LORN follow standards in content description (VETADATA, adaptation of IEEE LOM) and content packaging such as IMS packaging and SCORM. They also conform to controlled vocabulary standards, specifically for qualifications, units of competency and industry classifications. All learning objects are copyright cleared with the adoption of the AeSharenet licensing regime. The process of metadata harvesting conforms to the Open Archive Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standards.

OTEN Learning Support (OLS) website, OTEN

Organisation: OTEN Learning Support Website, TAFE NSW Western Sydney Institute, OTEN
Impact: Open Training Education Network (OTEN)

OTEN is the distance education arm of TAFE NSW and is part of Western Sydney Institute. The OTEN Internet web site provides essential information for prospective students and business clients and includes descriptions about OTEN as an organisation, its course offerings and enrolment information. The OTEN Learning Support (OLS) site is a large web-based system that was developed to enable teachers a means of providing learning support materials to their students. Teachers and students are provided with a personalised view upon individual login.

Since its inception in 2002 the OLS has grown exponentially and is now attracting nearly 30000 student logons per month. In 2005 OTEN undertook a project to redesign and redevelop the OTEN and OLS websites into a combined website. The aim is to provide a one-stop-shop for all current and potential user groups, but within an integrated and effective framework.

The overall project goal is to redevelop the OTEN and OLS websites using a user-centred approach to create a contemporary website that enables the continuation of the successful devolved model approach, but with tighter regulations to ensure a scalable, sustainable and quality web delivery platform. In addition, a key requirement for the re-design is to make the site accessible for people with disabilities without reducing ease of use for other users.

SkillsPro Learning Plan Generator at TAFE NSW

Organisation: Manufacturing, Engineering, Construction and Transport Curriculum Centre, TAFE NSW

The SkillsPro Learning Plan Generator is a TAFE NSW product developed by the Manufacturing, Engineering, Construction and Transport Curriculum Centre (MEC&T). It is an easy-to-use tool which enables teachers and training providers to design and deliver compliant training programs. This tool is currently used by all TAFE NSW and some Victorian TAFE Institutes. Advanced features of the tool are used by private enterprise in carrying out task analysis and skills audits to identify work re-organisation and gap training needs to meet industry standards. Documents with customised data can be automatically generated, saving enormous amounts of time spent on documentation and record-keeping. Some examples of documents include:

The Integrated Content Environment for Research and Scholarship - Improving the sustainability of research publications

Organisation: The University of Southern Queensland
Impact: The University of Southern Queensland

The Integrated Content Environment (ICE) is a word processor based system that allows authors to work individually or collaboratively on material for the Web, CD and print. Developed at the University of Southern Queensland as an open source project it is builds on using standards and more sustainable methods of authoring using different word processors across multiple platforms. The ICE for Research and Scholarships project (ICE-RS) received funding from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) in 2006 to extend features in ICE in order to improve the process of conducting and reporting on research.

The ICE-RS project seeks to improve national research effectiveness by providing infrastructure in the form of software tools, documentation and pre-packaged training materials for academic authors. It also seeks to improve efficiency, provide greater usability of research outputs, and publication to research repositories for sustainability.

ICE-RS is designed to deliver infrastructure that complements repository services by providing a field-tested open source product for writing research publications, with detailed documentation and training packages. ICE-RS consists of:

  1. A version-controlled, distributed 'working repository' for documents in progress.
  2. An application for managing the process of writing research efficiently, for flexible delivery and long-term preservation.
  3. A proof of concept reporting system, that will allow institutions to better manage their research activities by allowing dynamic reporting on work in progress.

Sponsored by:

Department of Eductation, Science and Training IMS Global Learning Consortium
Backing Australia's Ability
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