April, 2010 6th issue

Connect the TEachers to reach and teach the NEt GENeration

LLP-LdV-TOI-2008-HU-016

Welcome
This 24 months long project is a collaboration of 11 CONTENT
partners from five countries. The “transfer of CONNECT THE TEACHERS TO REACH AND TEACH
innovation” will „valorize‟ the results of two earlier THE NET GENERATION .............................................1
successful LdV projects: SLOOP and NETIS. The WELCOME.........................................................................1
SLOOP project (Sharing Learning Objects in an
TENEGEN EXPERIENCES ..........................................1
Open Perspective) demonstrates key concepts in e-
learning 2.0; NETIS provides the philosophical, ACTIVITIES .....................................................................3
sociological, and pedagogical basis to support new NEWS..................................................................................3
paradigms of teaching and learning in the
EVENTS ..............................................................................3
Information Society. The aim of Tenegen project is
to establish an European environment of PROJECT BASICS .........................................................4
‟connectivism‟ for VET teachers and trainers, to
show the significant advantages of being connected
to the n-Gen instead of simply ‟delivering‟
knowledge through virtual classrooms and Learning This issue was published by:
Management System. CAPDM Ltd., UK
Editor: Ken Currie
Tenegen Team Copyright © Tenegen Consortium
http://tenegen.prompt.hu

Tenegen experiences
Tenegen partner, CAPDM Ltd., has a long history of on-line and distance development in
Higher Education in particular, but there is considerable overlap with similar initiatives being
run in schools and with school teachers.

One of the big problems is that of how to motivate teachers so that they want to participate in
the development on on-line courses. Merely involving technology can be a turn off for many.
Teachers are experienced at developing learning materials, but when that technology layer is
added many find it difficult to engage. Even those that do want to engage can find the rigours
and restrictions of an unfamiliar virtual learning environment (VLE) just too difficult to utilise in
any meaningful way. As part of the Tenegen project CAPDM have been experimenting with a
resource driven approach to developing good on-line materials, aimed at allowing the teacher
to work independently of the VLE when developing learning materials that are fit for purpose in
the sense that they are driven by the learning needs. This is in contrast to the situation where
the teacher is forced to take a particular approach as dictated by the technology.

It‟s not uncommon to hear course developers, instructional designers and e-learning
managers come out with statements like “SABA does it this way …” or “WebCT wants me to do
this …”. They are hostages to the technological. We want the teacher to be saying “my
learning materials would benefit from this learning feature … so I will include it”. It
is the job of the VLE to support the learning requirements dictated by this content. It is not
acceptable to have the restrictions of the VLE to dictate what the teacher – the expert – can
include.

Typically VLEs offer a remarkably limited packaged set of features, though they do usually –
sometimes uncomfortably – allow other packaged functionality to be bolted on. The user gets
whatever the system allows. These systems have been built with a systems orientation. It
would be better if the architecture was driven directly by the learning materials and their
needs. The emphasis should be on a Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) where the teacher,

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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 May, 2010 6th issue

not the technologists, dictates what is required. It is the job of the latter to ensure that the
needs of the former can be interpreted and delivered through the technology.

The ROA approach allows content developers to make very simple references to the various
features and supporting content that would enhance the student experience. The act of
referencing any other piece of available material, or functional features such as Forums or
Quizzes, will guarantee the presence and availability of that feature in the VLE. Allowing
developers to merely mention a resource needed to support the learning to actually invoke it
puts power and control directly back into the hands of the people who know best – the
teacher.

With an ROA approach, content development can absolutely concentrate on the overall
learning needs of the course or subject. This does not begin to suggest, however, that such
development should be a free for all. Of course it is essential to ensure that there is good
design, strategy and implementation so that the resulting courses are fit for purpose.

How does it work? Manifests

Moodle is an ideal starting point to explore the potential and requirement of an ROA approach
as it is extremely flexible. In the Tenegen ROA developments, two core technologies are used:

1) XML as a standards-based means of semantically marking up learning materials;

2) Manifests: symbolic descriptions of the environment needed to support the learning
requirements, driven by the content itself.

Manifests – which are also described in XML – are used to automatically construct the complete
Moodle front page and all of the structure underneath. Manifests will guarantee an „end point‟
for all features (e.g. Forums, Quizzes) included, or mentioned, in the learning content as they
are partly derived from an analysis of the content itself.

Manifests also make it easy to port the course to different Moodle instances (e.g. development
instance to delivery instance). They also ensure that the same course can be created in other
VLEs – provided they are extended to support Manifests.

Manifests play another very important role, particularly when putting together very complex
courses. The Manifest acts as a … manifest. It ensures that all of the constituent content is
assembled together. The Manifest itself is constructed to describe an overall structure, from
features explicitly included in the learning materials. It provides a simple working focus for a
functional manifest – one that explicitly builds the delivery environment it describes.

VLE Independence

One final word about the ROA approach and the use of XML: an entire course, including all the
content and function features that are to be used in the delivery, can be written, captured in
XML and have a Manifest without ever having been near to a VLE. That is, the entire course
and its structural description can – and should be – developed independent of, and not
influenced by, a VLE. This ensures that the focus of development is on the educational and
pedagogical need.

Of course delivery will be through a VLE, but the Manifest should be rich enough to make this
automatic and instant. It takes seconds to load up a course into a Manifest-aware Moodle.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Page 2 of 4
 May, 2010 6th issue

Does this help to motivate and involve the teachers? It certainly frees them from having to be
able to develop inside of a VLE, and it frees them up to being able to develop educationally
sound materials that will eventually be delivered through a VLE. They can concentrate their
expertise on the educational aspects, knowing that the on-line delivery is taken care of.

If you would like to find out more about the ROA work in Tenegen, contact the project team
through the web site.

Activities
The first of the five Tenegen modules in Hungarian has now
been translated into English. It will be marked up in XML
using the DocBook DTD, along with its Manifest. This will be
made available through Moodle to the Tenegen community.
Other modules will follow before the end of the project.

News – Tenegen Pilot in English

The online pilot of the first module – TC01 – E-learning
concepts – will start on 3rd of May in English. The Tenegen
consortium invites all teachers and trainers in vocational
schools and in higher education – from Europe and from other countries – to visit the Moodle
site for the course: http://tenegen.eu/course. Please register on it, take a look around and join
in with this exciting international experiment!
The module is intended to help teachers to understand and apply basic concepts of technology-
based teaching/learning, and covers e-learning state-of-the-art and e-learning trends. After
finishing the module, the participants should be able to navigate, collaborate and engage in
discussions within e-learning environments. They should be able to analyze the needs of their
students – the Net Generation – and synthesize the new knowledge to assist with the
evaluation of present pedagogical methods. Finally, they should also be able to identify,
categorize and evaluate various Web 2.0 tools, to discover the pedagogical potential of
intensive on-line collaboration.

Dissemination in Hungary
On 16-17th April 2010: the “2nd Szeged Workshop on Educational Evaluation” conference
was established in Szeged (Hungary). Organizer and host institutions were:

- University of Szeged Institute of Education

- University of Szeged Center for Research on Learning and Instruction
- University of Szeged Graduate School of Educational Sciences
- Szeged Branch of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
At the conference the experience gained to date from the Hungarian Tenegen pilot were
presented by Péter Fehér and Judit Hornyák under the title of “Myth or reality? The Net
Generation in Hungary”.

Events
The fourth Tenegen project meeting is scheduled to take place in Budapest, Hungary, on the
19th and 20th July 2010.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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 May, 2010 6th issue

Project basics
Acronym: TENEGEN
Title: Connect the teachers to reach and teach the Net Generation
Duration: 1.October 2008 – 30. September 2010
Action type: Transfer of Innovation
Programme: Leonardo da Vinci – LLL Subprogramme
Participating countries: Hungary, Italy, Germany, Turkey
Website: http://tenegen.prompt.hu
Contact: Mária Hartyányi, Prompt-G Educational Centre for Informatics, Hungary
E-mail: maria.hartyanyi@prompt.hu, skype: hmaria718

Partnership
PROMPT Prompt-G Educational Centre for Informatics, HU (Co-ordinator)
CNR National Research Council - Institute for Educational Technology, IT
ISERG Information Society Education and Research Group University of
West Hungary, HU
CAPDM CAPDM Ltd,.UK
DEKRA DEKRA Akademie GmbH, DE
BUNI Balýkesir University TR
ÖJSZIGK Öveges József Vocational and Grammar School, HU
NIVE National Institute of Adult and Vocational Education, HU
BJMSZ Bottyán János Vocational Secondary School, HU
KGYGIVSZ Krúdy Gyula Secondary School, HU
SZIGSZ Széchenyi István Secondary Grammar School, HU

Target groups
 teachers and trainers in vocational education,
 trainers in adult education;
 school-leaders (headmasters) in VET schools and the staff of higher education institutes,
 students of vocational schools ;
 university students;
 policy makers;
 European e-learning providers.

Objectives
 elaborate a pedagogical model of network learning and „connectivism‟;
 develop an online repository of Open Source Learning Objects;
 develop a TENEGEN network learning environment based on open source LMS;
 elaborate and implement five training modules in three languages (HU, EN, TR);
 establish pilot training courses for teachers and trainers;
 validate and verify the results in VET schools;
 disseminate the results all over Europe.

Work-packages
WP0 Project management
WP1 TENEGEN System Analysis and Design based on pedagogical and
sociological outcomes of NETIS
WP2 TENEGEN Systems Analysis and Design based on the concept of
SLOOP
WP3 Content development, review, translation
WP4 Implementation of TENEGEN networking platform
WP5 E-learning - the school of the future - Pilot course I.
WP6 Pilot course in VET schools
WP7 Evaluation
WP8 Dissemination and valorisation

Planned results
Online further training programme for teachers and trainers in five module in three language (HU, EN, TR),
implementing them in Moodle environment, and piloting the course in three countries (HU, EN, TR) and piloting them
in the target (importer) countries Hungary and Turkey. The Consortium intended to deliver the new paradigm of
network learning to the teachers and trainers in the vocational education, to help them “to reach and teach the Net
Generation”.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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