LeMill Blog

The European Commission has a Learning 2.0 case study in progress, and as part of that, they are interested in analyzing LeMill in detail. They have prepared a short online questionnaire for LeMill users. We hope that you have time to answer the questionnaire.

eLearning Papers online journal has published a special issue about open educational resources. One of the papers included in the issue is from our researcher and lead developer Tarmo Toikkanen: Simplicity and design as key success factors of the OER repository LeMill

We released LeMill version 2.5 already more than a week ago, but haven’t announced it in this blog yet, because there were some problems that had to be fixed. This release comes with two new templates in the Content section and more flexible editing options.

Lesson plan template has special fields for goals / objectives, description of the lesson and evaluation / assessment. Current use of LeMill shows that in some countries teachers create quite a lot of lesson plans (see lesson plans from Czech teachers). We hope that this new template will simplify creating and finding lesson plans.

Second new template enables teachers to share information about school projects and find project partners. Currently we have quite a lot of school projects in the Methods section but at some point we plan to clean up the Methods section and move existing school projects to the new template. Then Methods section will contain only context free descriptions of educational methods that can be reused in any collection.

Both new templates have also special fields for linking related content, methods and tools. You can see example lesson plan and school project.

Besides new templates we have made some changed to the way people can edit content. From this version draft content is not visible for other users by default. This will help to keep test content hidden and have only real learning resources visible. Those users who want to work collaboratively on a draft version can make the draft visible for others.

We have also some plans about publishing ready textbooks in LeMill. One of these projects will hopefully be educational technology handbook for Estonian schools. For textbooks it is important to have a stable version that is not edited frequently. Therefore first author can now choose if other people will edit the same resource or a copy is made for them when they start editing. All the copies will be linked to the original version in a same way as translations are linked with each other.

Thanks to hard work from Jukka, and our service provider‘s excellent backup facilities, we were able to pinpoint the time when the connections between resources were lost, causing empty groups and empty collections. After we had the restored database available, Jukka constructed a script to check each collection and group, and add missing connections from the backup. This process is now complete, so all collections and other links should be restored to what they’re supposed to be. Thank you for your patience!