Ulf Lundin: The purpose of this action is to establish a framework among the ministries of education in Europe and other interested partners for common action, work and approaches towards standards and interoperability for a European e-learning area.

We are very happy about the interest this initiative has attracted, the participation was larger than expected! We had a very productive “workshop”: 85 key players of the European eLearning field all together actively discussing and working towards a common action plan to reach a better level of interoperability for European eLearning.

Riina: Who were these people then?

Ulf: Among participants thirty-five represented EUN member organisation such as specialists working in the European Ministries of Education. It was very important for us to get such a large interests from out own members, this shows that there is demand for this kind of initiative.

Additionally, there were thirteen 13 contributing speakers from universities, (pre)standardisation committees and industry. Additionally, in the audience there were people from other interest groups like eLearning organisations and companies working in the field, researchers and so on. The participants list is quite impressive! (take a look at it here)

Riina: Could you tell us quickly what was the intent of the Launch event?

Ulf: We structured the event around four main areas such as (pre)standardisation bodies and industry; national initiatives; thematic areas; and the work that EUN has carried out in the field.

The opening ceremony included presentations from Mr. Richard Straub, the chairman of eLig, a body representing the European eLearning industry, and from Mike Collett from the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Learning Technologies, an organisation conducting pre-standardisation work in Europe. Also Steve Griffin from IMS Global, a consortium who's establishing specifications for eLearning was there to present the localisation effort leading to the establishment of European IMS. Additionally, Larry Fruth from the School Interoperability Framework, highlighted the opening of the LIFE initiative.

The opening was followed by presentations from five European Schoolnet member countries, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK. We had invited these countries because of the leading-edge work carried out both on the eLearning policy and the implementation level.

Furthermore, three thematic areas of action were explored: ePortfolios; Learning Object Repositories; and Open Source and Open Standards. European Schoolnet is involved in all these areas, also in the latter we have just produced a Special Insight Report: Why Europe Needs Free and Open Source Software and Content in Schools. It was important to give floor to specialists broadening the issues concerned in these areas.

The end of the first day was highlighted by Bill Olivier from CETIS who was able to clearly speak about the process of adapting standards and specs by a wider audience. This presentation was able to outline the whole complexity of the work involved in this field.

The day was very compressed and full of good speakers, also I learned a lot!

Riina: What about the work that is carried out in European Schoolnet, there are many EU-projects dealing with interoperability?

Ulf: In the second day we demonstrated the results of our standards-based projects like CELEBRATE and OASIS. Both of them are reaching towards their end, and we are currently preparing the outcomes for a larger scale roll-out.

Actually, in the event itself the CELEBRATE partners from Sun Microsystems and Giunti Interactive Lab performed a search using CELEBRATE- brokerage system. What is unique in this is that it allows users to perform a federated search, based on asynchronous messaging across heterogeneous repositories containing both Learning Objects (LOs) and their smaller media components or “Learning Assets”. What a monster of a phrase!

Also, in the OASIS project we have been working to localise a datamodel for SIF, Schools Interoperability Framework to better suite to the European environment. This work has been carried out by Oasis partners in conjunction with CEN/ISSS LTWS and people from the American initiative, it's highly appreciated piece of work.

Riina: What about now, any concrete actions planned?

Ulf: First of all, there will be a core group of people brought together to draft a work-programme for the future LIFE.

Secondly, we are planning to carry out some nationally and regionally focused workshops dealing with interoperability issues that are relevant for that area and the people sharing the field. For example for now, most of the countries have been busy with educational content. Now we have to look further than that, such as mechanisms to share it on the European level and possibilities to localise content into different languages. Also, developing “open content” seems to be in the interest of many. We need to guarantee methods for co-existence of both “open” and commercial content, they are not exclusive.

European Schoolnet itself will also have to follow its time, thus a subcommittee for school portals is planned to be set up. This will consist of national school portals who are interested in building their future plans on a solid base of using all the interoperability concepts to network and share both knowledge and content.

Riina: Quite an ambitious programme! What will come out of this?

Ulf: For sure we intend to keep the momentum going! European Schoolnet is currently involved in working with all the organisations who were present, it's keeping us all very busy, but the good thing is that now we know that what we are doing is also important for our members (Ministries of Education and national school networks) and we can better co-ordinate our synergies in the filed.

It was also important to get involved with people who are working across the whole eLearning sector. Although European Schoolnet's interest is in serving the European schools, many of the issues regarding interoperability are common to all the sectors such as higher education, vocational training, commercial training sector and also life long learning.

Riina: Thank you! or should I say, see you in the next LIFE...