K4A to organize satellite events at the 2nd World OER Congress in 2017

Knowledge 4 All Foundation has started a unique cooperation with UNESCO in terms of co-hosting the 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia, from 18 – 20 September 2017. This is connected with the work of K4A in establishing the OpeningupSlovenia initiative centered around open and digital education.

We will be working together with UNESCO,  Commonwealth of Learning, Creative Commons, the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning, and other partners as well as with the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana
2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana

Positive 1st review of TraMOOC project

The first project review of the project TraMOOC took place this week at the European Commission premises in Luxembourg , with excellent results. The independent reviewers invited by the EC have awarded the project an excellent overall evaluation. TraMOOC machine translations have matured significantly during the project.

3rd traMOOC project meeting in Dublin

traMOOC partners have meet again  to discuss progress and future strategy. In a follow-up to the Corfu meeting, traMOOC partners have meet to evaluate the progress made in each work package during the first few months of the project.

 

MOOC provider Iversity hosts TraMOOC project meeting

K4A and Iversity are partners and case studies in the traMOOC – Translation for Massive Open Online Courses – project. This workshop was designed and organised to produce multilingual service scenarios within the Iversity platform for online learning that would enables a more global reach for the platform and opportunities to get recognised credentials, no matter where users are.

K4A runs the 2nd Internet of Education Conference in Bosnia

Knowledge 4 All Foundation has organised its 2nd Internet of Education Conference (IOE 2015) in Sarajevo. This provided an opportunity to highlight the importance of the following in open education:

  1.  technical developments in support of open learning environments (as indicated in the EC communication Opening up Education),
  2. the value of multi-lingual tools in increasing access to open education and MOOCs, in particular the tools developed within the TraMOOC,EMMA, TransLectures and Active2Trans projects and OER gathering projects like ExplorEdu, and ICT in schools via MyMachine,
  3.  the smart partnership across different stakeholders in education from primary and HEI to civil society, governments and companies as reflected in the OpeningupSlovenia initiative.

This was a great opportunity to discuss and design best practice transfer from Slovenia and Europe, stimulate a strategy for new regional “Openingup” initiatives and present what is already being developed in the SEE region.

 

2nd traMOOC project meeting in Corfu

traMOOC partners have meet for the second time to discuss progress and future strategy, this time in Corfu. In a follow-up to the Berlin meeting, traMOOC partners have meet to evaluate the progress made in each work package during the first few months of the project. They have also prepared for the forthcoming European Commission review and consolidate exploitation strategy which also focuses on OpeningupSlovenia and other plans for year two and beyond.

 

K4A trustee to become UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER

On September 30th 2014 the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning was established in Slovenia. The Chairholder is Mitja Jermol, one of the six Knowledge 4 All Foundation trustees. UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, and the Director of the Jožef Stefan Institute, Professor Jadran Lenarčič, signed an agreement establishing a UNESCO Chair at the Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Institute is also one of the leading powers behind OpeningupSlovenia.

EU funded projects

transLectures

transLectures is an EU-funded project to develop innovative, cost-effective tools for the automatic transcription and translation of online educational videos.

Online collections of video material are fast becoming a staple feature of the Internet and a key educational resource. What we are working on at transLectures is a set of easy-to-use tools that will allow users to add multilingual subtitles to these videos. In doing so, they will make the content of these videos available to a much wider audience in a way that is cost-effective and sustainable over the vast collections of online video lectures being generated.

Automatic transcription tools will provide verbatim subtitles of the talks recorded on video, thereby allowing the hard-of-hearing to access this content. Language learners and other non-native speakers will also benefit from these monolingual subtitles. Meanwhile, machine translation tools will make these subtitles available in languages other than that in which the video was recorded.

Specifically, we will be developing tools for use on VideoLectures.NET, a collection of videos recorded at various academic events set up by JSI’s Centre for Knowledge Transfer, and for poliMedia, a lecture capture system designed and implemented at the UPVLC. Our tools will also be fully compatible with Matterhorn, a free, open-source platform for the management of educational audio and video content

The language pairs being targeted in this project are English, Spanish and Slovenian for transcription, and English<>Spanish, English<>Slovenian, English>French and English>German for translation

Mission

The foundation promotes the spread of knowledge and vivid academic debate to anyone with access to the internet anywhere in the world. It therefore benefits all those interested in academic knowledge and debate, where they do not currently have immediate access to such resources and debate. It also helps to develop more widespread interest in such resources and debate.
The Foundation promotes the open access to academic resources (such as video lectures, learning objects, paper, reports, books, and scientific data), together with tools to give users access to these resources and to match them to their needs. Furthermore, the Foundation aims to help overcome the barriers of limited discoverability and accessibility, as well as enable interaction between users and providers, and among users with common interests.

The Foundation is a forum where creators, technology developers, managers and users of such resources and tools can meet to actively promote the free availability and distribution of such content and tools, as well as develop strategies for fostering interactions between users and providers and among users with common interests.

The Foundation has its main office in London, England, but it operates globally together with a subsidiary “Zavod Znanje za Vse” in Ljubljana, Slovenia, responsible for infrastructure development as well as the maintenance and development of an exemplar site, videolectures.net.