The Technical University Dortmund is designing an e-learning programme for young people that works equally well for apprentices with disabilities. The plan will bring e-learning to apprentices with visual, cognitive, motor and auditory disabilities and others in vocational training in the transport and warehousing sectors of German industry. Barrier-free training will comply with German and international laws and standards. Björn Fisseler, TU Dortmund's project coordinator for ELoQ – the E-Learning-based Logistics Qualification, will explain at OEB how the team are handling this challenging project.
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With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, such as user-created content or social networks, approaches to learning have changed radically – but methods of assessment have not. Today’s learners pick up information in online communities from their peers. They are encouraged to collaborate, share knowledge and work in teams but, rather than assessing these skills, most institutions still focus on what students memorise for traditional exams. At OEB 2010, two sessions organised by the European Commission will elaborate on more up-to-date assessment projects, giving participants the opportunity to discuss the potential of new technologies in this field.
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“Learning must have personal meaning and it should be fun”, says Esko Lius, project coordinator of “New Ways of Experiential Learning in Virtual Learning Environments" at the Sotunki Distance Learning Centre in Finland. His institution has developed several learning modules in Second Life, such as biology, geography and literature. Moving classes to SL makes distance learning more attractive, more social and finally more effective, Lius is convinced. At ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN, the Finnish researcher will present a virtual learning path literary history.
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One of the most charismatic research scientists of our time will be the inspiration at this year’s SCHOOL FORUM. For the first time, Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology and instigator of the famous “Hole in the Wall” experiment on self-organised learning in the slums of India, will deliver a keynote speech to teachers and principals in Germany. His “hands-off” method will be explained along with the “hands-on” approach of Russell Stannard, whose online videos on the use of Web 2.0 tools in teaching have helped to instruct educators all over the world.
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School curricula will soon become obsolete, says Charles Leadbeater, a leading expert on innovation and strategy and a keynote speaker at OEB 2010. He advocates “disruptive innovation” and radical transformation. In the digital age, students should be seen as “users” of education rather than “recipients” and teachers should, therefore, focus on skills, motivation and peer-to-peer learning, rather than on detailed educational programmes. The author and strategic adviser to corporations and governments is a senior associate of the London think tank Demos, where he explores the dynamics of innovation in various parts of the world. His most recent work includes a report on “Learning from the Extremes,” which highlights new approaches to learning in slums, favelas and other challenging living conditions, providing insights into how the developed world should reform its education systems.
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ACS International Schools serve international and local communities from three sites in Greater London: Cobham, Egham and Hillingdon. The schools are co-educational and offer day and boarding education to pupils aged two to eighteen. They educate a multinational student body in accordance with American and internationally recognised educational principles and practices, such as the International Baccalaureate. ACS started the search for an online language-learning environment that would be accessible to pupils from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as well as catering to different learning styles and ability levels. In 2006, the school’s management chose the Rosetta Stone Classroom language learning programme to integrate its large population of international students into the school environment.
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Starting university can be a daunting experience for new students. The first few days will provide many new experiences and raise a whole range of emotional responses – from excitement and anticipation to homesickness and loneliness. To help new undergraduates find their way, Gilly Salmon and Palitha Edirisingha, both professors of e-learning at the University of Leicester, launched a podcasting project in 2006. The project, entitled “Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation for Transition (IMPALA4T)”, developed a model for capturing undergraduates’ informal knowledge and experience (‘hot knowledge’) for podcasts. Now they present the results of their research.
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Generations of medical students have prepared themselves for exams by reading mountains of books in dim light, accompanied by impersonal lectures and teaching done at patients’ bedsides. But the medical education landscape is changing rapidly as online and digital training devices are becoming increasingly popular. The advantages are clear: Students want to learn any place and anytime, which is only possible with highly flexible e-learning tools. At OEB 2009, the Dutch organisations SURFnet and Kennisnet will present two mobile-learning projects carried out in the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) using eBook readers and PDAs. Two further language and spatial mobile-learning projects will also be the subject of discussion. The audience is invited to react to statements about mobile learning through a mobile quiz.
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Sport plays a crucial social role in the integration of young people into society and now it is increasingly being used as an incentive to increase motivation for learning and training. At OEB, four fascinating e-learning projects that revolve around the world of sports will be presented. The first involves football stadiums, which serve as authentic working worlds to grab pupils’ attention and provide them with orientation for their own career choices. The second is Playing for Success, a UK project that successfully attracts young people by offering the opportunity to learn in sports venues rather than in the classroom. Next is the PC learning game Champions for South Africa, in which pupils experience the “Rainbow Nation” during the upcoming World Cup from the perspective of street kids. And finally, participants will be able to discover how video annotations improve the training of table tennis coaches and referees.
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Sixteen years old and having failed at school, Zenna Atkins launched her first social enterprise. She aspired to help people who appeared to share her fate: a dismal future due to a lack of academic qualifications. Today she leads the UK’s school inspection, Ofsted, successfully runs her own company, and is engaged in a wide range of social welfare activities. Read on to discover what Zenna Atkins thinks about the current and future state of the education system and her views on how technology and e-learning can play a role in making things better.
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California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has launched an initiative to ban textbooks from high school classrooms and replace them with digital material. Traditional books are too expensive, antiquated and so heavy that the former bodybuilder and actor (‘The Terminator’) joked in June that he “could use them for biceps curls”. His state initiative is the first of its kind in the US, but it highlights the trend for more and more US schools and universities to go online, according to Dr Bob Barrett, a professor at the School of Business at the American Public University. He will give a presentation at the OEB 2009.
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Building the school of the future: With the new School Forum – the Berlin Forum on Technology and Learning Trends for Schools, OEB aims to create a central meeting point for teachers and headteachers interested in qualified and exciting e-learning projects. By gaining insights from renowned experts, as well as inspiring and sharing knowledge with each other, educators can broaden their horizons and explore new ways of successfully employing e-learning in the classroom. Many hands-on activities will help them to personally explore “how it really works”. OEB project leader Annemieke Akkermans says that “with the new School Forum which offers intense and attractive training possibilities for teachers, OEB wants to reach out to those responsible for our children’s education.”
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All About Generation Y

How should we deal with a new generation of learners who grew up with the Internet and who are currently entering our schools, universities and corporate learning centres? Who are they? What do they expect from their teachers and trainers? What sets them apart from previous generations? To find out what really lies behind the labels "Generation Y", "Net Generation" and "New Millennials", experts from all over the world shared their research findings, real-life experiences and promising approaches at this year's OEB.
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Discussion: Who Needs Teachers Anyway?

What could be the role of the teacher in an Open Educational Resources scenario - an education system where content is packaged in an open library concept, allowing visitors to help themselves to whatever they find? Will teachers – based on this development – become obsolete in the future? This is a core question Dr Giselle Ferreira will raise at OEB. A lecturer and educational reseacher, she works at the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology at the UK Open University. In her presentation "Out with the Old, in with the New? Questions Concerning the Role of the Teacher in 21st -Century Education", she will concentrate on findings from her recent study on the impact of open-access informal-learning environments.
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Learning Together: 10 Years of Best Practice at Fronter

The New Millennials are entering universities and workplaces worldwide. While experts still debate the question whether generational differences exist, universities and corporate training departments have to deal with the challenges faced by the new learners. “Collaborative”, “achievement-orientated” and “networked” are just a few terms that describe them. We have asked Roger Larsen, Managing Director and Founder of Fronter, market leader in providing open learning platforms for schools and universities all over Europe, how his company is tackling the challenge. Larsen is one of the keynote speakers at OEB 2008.
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The Talking Essay – Video Feedback for Students

Russell Stannard, Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster, uses screen recorder software to teach students and give feedback on essays and presentations. Once started as an experiment in Stannard’s course on English for Academic Purposes, the video feedback method has become very popular amongst students and teachers all over the university and has been extended to a whole variety of courses. Stannard has recently won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in ICT.
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Meeting the Needs of the New Learners

Generation Y, or the Millennials, are featured throughout this year’s ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2008 conference programme. People involved in learning and training from all parts of the world seem to be concerned about what is going on in today’s classrooms. The presentations and discussions held at OEB 2008 will show a great variety of aspects of this global phenomenon.
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Digital Storytelling in E-Learning

Digital storytelling is an efficient way of framing complex situations and helping audiences to make sense of what otherwise may be highly challenging connections in a rapidly changing workplace, says Dr Matthew Murray, Senior Learning Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. At Online Educa Berlin 2008, he will depict creative, flexible and practical methods for designing and developing engaging e-learning for Gen Y learners.
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E-Learning for the Ne(x)t Generation of Students

The “Millenials” or “Generation Y” are on everyone’s lips today. Commentators contend they are fast, result-oriented and impatient in regard to reaching their targets. In the context of the European eLene TLC Consortium, Ineke Lam from the IVLOS-Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands, took a closer look at the topic. Her aim is to show how to optimally prepare universities for the ne(x)t generation of students. At OEB 2008, she and Magda Ritzen from IVLOS-Universiteit Utrecht, will give further insights into the eLene project and a related study conducted by researchers from six European countries.
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Michael Wesch Explores the “Crisis of Significance”

“The most significant problem in education today is the problem of significance itself”, says Michael Wesch, cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. As an active teacher, he experiences the challenge of making learning meaningful and of inspiring his students every day. The researcher will hold a keynote speech at this year’s OEB and will contribute to one of the event’s overriding themes, “Meeting the Learning Needs of Generation Y”.
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Wikis in Education: Public, Semi-Public, or Private - Which is Best?

Online Educa Berlin will feature several presentation and discussion sessions about how blogs and wikis are being used to stimulate reflective practice and collaborative learning in universities and other institutions of higher education. Sarah Guth from the University of Padua, Italy, has introduced wikis into her language teaching courses – with interesting results …
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Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning

Helping teachers to become democratic leaders with a strong presence in the classroom - whether physical or virtual - is the main aim of Ingemar Svensson, project manager at the Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning. He will give further insight into the work of his institution in the session “Teacher Training and the Use of ICT” on Thursday, November 29.
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Multidimensional and Fun: Internet & Radio Teaching in Rural Grecian Schools

Nearly all types of communication technology can be used as educational accessories, depending on the initiative and imagination of the organisers and teachers. Radio broadcasts in particular have great potential if combined with the Internet for the asynchronous delivery of content, says Professor Costas Tsolakidis from the University of the Aegaen. His team has developed a programme to help teachers in rural areas of Greece perform their duties in an innovative way using Internet Radio. Prof. Tsolakidis will present this experimental project in detail on Friday, November 30, in the presentation session “Applying ICT and Traditional Media in Schools.”
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Prof. Sugata Mitra to hold Keynote at Online Educa Berlin 2007

Exploring the unmapped terrain between human and machine learning has been the main interest of Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK. He is also Chief Scientist Emeritus with NIIT Limited, India, one of the largest private educational institutions in the world. Sugata Mitra has become internationally known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment, which he started in New Delhi in 1999.

Prof. Sugata Mitra will be a keynote speaker at Online Educa Berlin 2007 in Berlin. The OEB Press Team asked him about his current investigations.
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From Project Plan to ROI

Implementing successful online training is not an easy task. Many factors have to be considered until you can start your training. Ursula Hesselmann from ZF Friedrichshafen AG provides insight into online training for the automotive industry sector.

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Your training content is available online? That alone won’t do!

Online learning is a change process and means much more than just putting learning content online. This is one of Nils Jörgensen’s basic arguments in his session about online learning at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2006. In his presentation, he explores the main challenges to online learning and addresses basic issues in designing effective learning environments.

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