|
The Project Candidates are initiatives that the ESAF Working Party concluded are more appropriately taken forward by individual agencies. They are superstructure projects — examples of the kinds of initiative that will take advantage of the infrastructure ESAF puts in place. These can be done in parallel to ESAF Projects and would provide services that directly support the NetworkedLearners? concept. There are 2 projects which are candidates for inclusion in the ESAF scope, which have currently been excluded. This needs to be confirmed. QDocument Exchange Framework Raise sector awareness and capability around access to and use of shared documents. This is likely to involve progressively moving selected documents to a common XML? DTD or schema, such as the Text Encoding Initiative DTD or the OpenOffice.org XML File Format. People need to be able to conduct element level searches across distributed document collections, retrieve relevant documents or parts of documents, and use the documents they find to create new documents. People expect to be able to use documents others have created, whether or not creator and user have the same software.
There needs to be a greater awareness of the issues associated with using formats like .pdf (eg how to link to a specific place in the document, rather than just returning the whole document) and .doc (eg difficulty of separating content from presentation and cross-platform issues). This project can provide information about the kinds of XML-based tools available and how to use them effectively.
QMARS record format The library community has developed the MARC exchange format specification for sharing bibliographic records between systems. In a similar way, the education sector can define a MARS record format specification. All systems in the sector will progressively migrate to versions that support the MARS record format for output and input. From an individual user’s point of view, I can press a button and securely send a record for a student to another institution. As the recipient, I can press a button and load it into my own system. The MARS record specification would take the form of an XML? DTD or schema. Most systems would support a subset of the full MARS specification, at least initially.
The remaining projects are currently defined as outside ESAF’s scope. This planning assumption needs to be validated. On this page… (hide)
Offer a collection of education-oriented, web-based services to learners, teachers and families. When a learner gets an NSI number, she or he also gets a .nzed account. Holders of a .nzed account log in at the education portal to access hosted services such as (these are just examples): a nzed.edu.nz email address (with spam filtering), a web address book, web-based file storage using the WebDAV standard, a personal web site, a weblog, a web calendar, mailing lists, instant messaging — services which it would be uneconomic for many education providers to offer their students. It makes it easier for learners in different places with a shared interest to collaborate. By using a web-based approach and open standards, it opens doorways to many of those currently excluded from the eLearning world. It would be available in both English and Māori, giving more people an opportunity to become familiar with te reo. The .nzed account log-on becomes the person’s eKey. The services complement, rather than replace, services that individual institutions provide their students. This work would build upon the foundation provided by the Tertiary Education Portal and Tertiary e-Learning portal.
QVideoconferencing Capability Raising There is an opportunity to accelerate the growth of videoconferencing in the schools sector to support distance learning and enable evolution of the virtual classroom. The physical infrastructure and standards are largely in place, but schools need help to learn how to take advantage of it. This includes what equipment to purchase and how to set it up; building a community of practice around how teachers can make effective use of the technology in the classroom; and bringing more schools into the network; and extending the network to cover more schools. The intent is to increase the uptake of the technology.
QMessage Translation between email & txt When I send an email to an SMS phone, I write it normally and it arrives as a text message in “txt”. When I send an SMS text message to an email address from my phone, I write it as a “txt msg” and it arrives translated into a plain text email message. (For example, phone sees: CUL8R, computer sees: See you later.) I might be able to use a browser screen like the wiki edit screen to write a whole page in txt; when I save it, the output displays as ordinary text. And vice versa — write the page as ordinary text, the output displays in txt. This service requires a translation table.
QIntegrated School Library System With the exception of school libraries, all NZ libraries are networked allowing for resource sharing to occur in a number of ways. The exclusion of school libraries means that resource sharing and technical support cannot occur for this sector either locally or nationally. This can readily be overcome by the provision of open standards compliant software in schools, networked to existing centralised systems at NLNZ. The outcomes of such a project would enable the school library to be included in local networks of public and tertiary libraries and for these local collections to behave as one virtual collection. There would be a national union catalogue where each school can record its holdings. Also accessable would be the NLNZ school collections, the large periodical collections, plus potentially the large range of overseas periodical databases.
The strengths and weaknesses of school libraries would be readily apparent and for the first time, national purchasing of books would be practical using the eProcurement model. NLNZ estimates this would increase purchasing power of schools by at least 30%. An estimate for the project needs to be done but it is unlikely to be particularly high as a number of NZ-based products exist and a national license should not be costly. Schools will retain local choice: they can use the shared system or run their own system, provided that it interoperates with others.
QRepository of Digital Publications Agencies across the education sector produce publications and other materials that go out to providers. Currently there is no searchable digital collection of these, either for a single agency or across agencies. If a school loses a document that the Ministry or another agency sends out, there is nowhere to go to get a new copy. Establishing a shared repository entails policy, legal, educational, cultural, and technical components, most of which are interrelated and each of which must be satisfactorily addressed for the repository to succeed. This is not a document management system, which focuses primarily on the document authoring process. Rather, it is an open library of digital publications, catalogued to facilitate searching and retrieval. A number of projects at overseas universities have developed solutions to this problem, including Fedora™, ePrints, and DSpace.
Offer a web-based service for maintaining contact and subject area information aboout people and organisations. Instead of every organisation keeping its own address book, or relying on printed handbooks that may be out of date, there is a sector web site. You can find, for example, the email address of the principal of a particular school, the name and phone number of the person who has access to a particular piece of information, or whom to contact to get a copy of a particular sector publication, or email addresses of members of a particular schools cluster. Individuals can maintain their own contact information and access is secure, so unauthorised visitors are not able to harvest email addresses, for example. The information is of a kind that it is already in the public arena, but scattered over many unconnected locations.
QNational Student Index Framework Giving every student a unique identifier is a fundamental enabler of the shift from institution-centred to learner-centred education. Using one identifier, that everyone uses to record information about that student, will make it possible for learners to see all the information held about their electronic learning lives. It will make it easier for agencies to identify and help learners who fall between the institutional cracks and to identify people who are not getting the education to which they are entitled. With appropriate controls to ensure anonymity, it will become possible to carry out much more accurate time series analysis of educational performance and combine information from different sources, leading to better policy decisions based on sound evidence. Privacy and security protocols need to be developed in parallel with the technical capability to issue and track identifiers. Children will get an identifier when they first come into contact with “the education system” and will take it with them wherever they go, throughout their learning lives. This project would build upon the work of TISSL in the creation of the NSI system.
QOpen Student Management System Facilitate development or purchase of an open standards based, web-enabled, student management system for schools — a schools administration system. Sharing a common system will make it easier to adapt to a student-centred model. Students and their parents and teachers will be able to see all the information about the student’s learning, across multiple institutions. It will make it easier to track students as they move from school to school, or enroll at more than one school in order to take specialist courses. It would allow smaller schools with limited budgets to reap economies of scale and have access to an administration system that they could otherwise not afford. Compliance with data exchange standards will be built in, reducing the cost of school data returns for all parties. It could allow development of a more active market for system support services. Schools will retain local choice: they can use the shared system or run their own system, provided that it interoperates with others. This work will build upon the foundation of knowledge provided by the existing Tertiary Student Management Systems.
QXML schema or DTD for Ministerials There is an opportunity for the sector to show leadership in the shift to Open Data Standards? and separating content from presentation, through the way in which Ministerials are produced. The sector would collaboratively develop a standard DTD that defines the structure of a Ministerial, together with attributes that facilitate searching the Ministerials database. It would also define a standard style sheet to ensure consistent presentation. This would facilitate the introduction of low cost XML? authoring tools, automatically ensure consistent structure and presentation of all Ministerials, and enable federated searching across multiple Ministerial collections. Once proven, the DTD can be proposed as a government standard. A business decision would be needed to choose between defining a DTD (supported by a wide range of authoring tools) or a schema (more powerful, but fewer tools support it).
← Projects | Requirements | How ESAF Works → |
Quick Links Principles
|