Case Studies/I-CLEEN
A project of MUSE (Museum of Sciences, Trento. Italy). To support science teachers in sharing OER resources that promote student-centred lessons on ESS (Earth System Sciences) — http://www.icleen.museum/
Overview
I-CLEEN, a project led by the MUSE Museum of Science of Trento (Italy), has developed and currently manages an information gateway of Earth system science educational resources. The aim of the project is to support Italian science teachers in setting up Earth science student-centred lessons. To do so effectively, the gateway exhibits the following key features: it adopts a bottom – up approach to resource development that relies on strong cooperation between science teachers and professional researchers of the MUSE and other local and national research centres (who also act as resource referees). I-CLEEN is subject–oriented and enhances the multi- and interdisciplinary traits that characterize geosciences; it embraces the concept of open source, through the technological tools (LifeRay) used and the Creative Commons licenses adopted (more then 90% of the resources are Open Educational Resources). A service usability study was performed after the first launch of the gateway and the results were used to develop the second release, which is currently online. During the preliminary phase of the project, as well as the development and set-up of the gateway, valuable insight was gained in various different fields:on the current situation in geoscience education in Italy, on the educational resource gateways currently available online. The gateway has been made with the support of the national agency of ministry of education (INDIRE-ANSAS) MUSE is a Science Centre located in Trento, (NE Italy) is a centre of cultural interpretation at the service of society for promoting sustainable development. It is dedicated to nature, and in particular to mountain landscape, but also to all sciences and to innovation. Evidence of the expertise in the field of natural sciences and science communication is based on numbers: 7 research departments with 55 permanent and 46 temporary staff involved in 28 research projects; 161,273 people visited the network museums in 2010; 68,157 students participated to educational activities held by 2 full time senior educators, 6 part time senior-, and 69 freelancer- educators. The project coordinator is Matteo Cattadori, a science teacher since 1988 to 2008. Since 2009 has obtained from the local school administration to work full time at the ICLEEN project The coordinator took part to several innovative experience of education and outreach in the context of international scientific researches like ANDRILL (Antarctic geological DRILLing www.andrill.org)
License Usage
The project publish educational resources made by the community of science teachers (of the ICLEEN and not) as well resources translated to italian (under permission) from different projects and languages. All the resources that are made by teachers of the ICLEEN community are published under Ccommons license Attribution and with the names of the original author/s. The resources translated from other projects/authors are selected following the established criteria, one of this is that they should be OER. All the resources and documents are published after a revision process made by the editorail staff and according to specific templates of the project in order to facilitate the adoption by users-teachers and shorten the process of preparation of the lecture. The organization and the project coordinator have no experience with Creative Commons licenses so far. The benefits and lesson learned in these years of activity of the project is that this kind of license fit perfectly with one of the primary goal of the project that is to enhance professional cooperation among teachers and sharing of effective resources.
Motivations
We hear the first time of Creative Commons licenses applyed to educational resources from the OER commons project http://www.oercommons.org/. The Museum at the beginning wanted to use the ICLEEN project not only to support science teachers collaborations but even as tool do disseminate educational labs and activities created during previuos temporary exhibits. According to this double goal the model of Ccommons license to adopt was perfect. We select the Attribution license fro resources written by teachers since we consider the fact that similar projects (like Science in School http://www.scienceinschool.org/) adopt this license for articles written by teachers, and other licenses (always Ccommons but different from Attribution) when the author is a scientist or a journalist or else To reinforce the importance of Ccommons model of our project we decided to use LifeRay (an OS software) as ICT tool that manage the entire website and service as well as to use open source format of file (odt).
Impact
The license has enabled a process (still ongoing) of inclusion of the website in the wide community of OER resources (and project using Os software) as well as other positive feed backs like for instance re-use of the documents.
Technical Details
Media
File:Http://www.icleen.museum/documents/10446/200462bb-e75b-4604-a0bb-5f610352a679
