The final review of the ROLE project took place this week in Luxembourg, and the KMi team led by Dr Alexander Mikroyannidis – who were awarded the ROLE dissemination trophy 3 times in the past – were given the award by the consortium for the whole project!
The final review meeting was very successful, concluding a 4-year endeavour of 16 institutions into the world of Personal Learning Environments and Self Regulated Learning. The reviewers commended the project partners on their technical and pedagogical work. Special commendations were received for the the work done in the test-beds of the project and for setting up a number of additional test-beds inside and outside the project consortium. Alex’s KMi ROLE team coordinated the activities of all the project test-beds. In addition to the 5 original test-beds, 14 more were created, attracting more than 4,000 users. In order to raise awareness about Personal Learning Environments and Self Regulated Learning among eLearning communities, the OU team has developed bespoke Open Educational Resources available as study units in LabSpace (see http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=7433 and http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=7898) and as an interactive eBook (currently under production).
The KMi team has been particularly active in sharing, promoting and disseminating project activities and results, for example in organising a series of hands-on workshops with a variety of audiences: notably the JTEL Summer School and the PLE Conference in Portugal, the OER World Congress in Paris, the Build a Widget Day in KMi, the Dev8Ed Conference in Birmingham, and the E-Learn conference in Montreal. We were also closely involved in establishing the, now annual, series of International Workshops on Cloud Education Environments. The first of these took place in Guatemala in November 2012 and the second will be co-located with the CSEDU and CLOSER conferences this May in Aachen, Germany. This is the level of activity that saw us carry away the prestigious ROLE awards on so many occasions – and this final time!
