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- NRC Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre
- NRC Centre for Surface Transportation Technology
- NRC Genomics and Health Initiative
- NRC Imaging Network Portal
- NRC Institute for Aerospace Research
- NRC Institute for Biodiagnostics
- NRC Institute for Information Technology
- NRC Institute for Microstructural Sciences
- NRC Institute for Research in Construction
- National Institute for Nanotechnology
- National Research Council Canada
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Project Leader
Stephen Downes
Phone: 506-861-0955
Fax: 506-851-3630
Email: Stephen.Downes@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Business Contact
Marc-Alain Mallet
Phone: 506-444-0394
Fax: 506-452-3859
Email: Marc-Alain.Mallet@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Personal Learning Environment
Learners today cannot rely on a single provider of educational support and resources. Learners today work in teams or in groups, with their peers either across the office or around the world, with learning materials created by education departments, equipment and software manufacturers, private training agencies, and more. But there is no means for a learner today to manage his or her learning as a whole: with each new provider the learner must begin anew with a new system and a blank slate. There is no way for the learner to manage his or her own records, mount his or her portfolio, to work on long term projects with friends or co-workers, or even to maintain the same user name across myriad educational resource sites.
This project draws on a concept that is gaining currency in the educational development field, that of the personal learning environment (PLE). The idea, as described in prototypes created by Britain’s CETIS (‘Plex’) and Canada’s NRC (gRSShopper), is to create a common environment in which a learner may aggregate resources and services from a large number of distinct providers, work with these materials to solve problems or create new resources, and then communicate these results to peer learners, instructors or mentors, evaluation and assessment agencies, or the public at large. The PLE will allow people to manage their own learning, and will function as the student’s personal educational record and online portfolio. It will link into educational, business and employment networks.
The outcome of this project will be twofold. On the one hand, there will be a ‘base application’ that students can use, either through a web-based interface or as a stand-alone application, to manage their educational opportunities. As well, there will be a set of ‘plug-ins’ or helper applications that will enable the base application to interact with other software and with remote systems.
