Report from the last Organic.Lingua Greek user trial

Another user trial of the Organic.Lingua project took place a few days before the end of the project, on the 12th of February 2014, at the premises of the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA), kindly hosted by the Laboratory of Viticulture and organized by Agro-Know.

The audience consisted of approximately 15 people, mostly post-graduate students of AUA as well as faculty of the laboratory; participation was not easy for anyone wishing to participate, as the exam period was ongoing during these days. The approach followed was according to the guidelines developed by the Organic.Lingua project, consisting of a couple of introductory presentations and a hands-on session. More specifically, the trial started with a presentation titled "Green Open Educational Resources (OER) concept", which provided an introduction to the OER concept and examples on web portals and other sources of green OER. The presentation was followed by another one, titled "Agricultural education collections & repositories", which provided information on the concept of metadata and their importance, how they are created and used in the portals for retrieving educational resources etc.

Presenting the OER concept

After a short coffee break, the re-engineered Organic.Edunet Web portal was presented to the participants; starting with a brief flash-back on how it all started, its evolution and the current status through the improvements made in the context of the Organic.Lingua project. The demonstration focused on the multilinguality features of the project such as the multilingual user interface and the metadata automatic translation features. The users were invited to register and follow a pre-defined scenario for browsing through the portal and perform specific activities which tested the portal's feature. The next step was the participation in the online questionnaire which was used by the participants to provide their feedback.

Partial view of the participants

The last session of the workshop included a hands-on session on the use of the AgLR tool and the new visualization interfaces of the Organic.Edunet ontology, which is going to replace the previously available semantic browsing option of the Organic.Edunet Web portal. Due to the fact that not all participants had their laptops available during the workshop, the specific part had to take place in groups rendering the process more challenging. However, this allowed a more informal discussion to take place by the end of the workshop, which focused mainly on various aspects of the Organic.Edunet Web portal and the OER concept in general.

Overall it was a nice experience; a validation and dissemination event for the Organic.Lingua project and an opportunity for the participants to get to know about OER, web sources of OER and of course the Organic.Edunet Web portal. You can find additional photos from the event here.