Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences

CASE-STUDY IN ITALY
Mara Masseroni1, Francesca Berengo1, Luigi Petruzziello1, Monica Terenghi1, Pierfranco Ravotto2
1

ITSOS Marie Curie, Cernusco sul Naviglio 2 AICA, Milano

masseroni.mara@gmail.com, francesca.berengo@tes.mi.it, luigi.petruzziello@tes.mi.it, monica.terenghi@tes.mi.it, p.ravotto@aicanet.it

ABSTRACT
The article presents the experience of the Sloop2desc courses in Italy, courses that involved over 600 teachers, mostly in the computer science field. The data show that the courses have been strongly characterized by interactions among people and collaboration for the production of open educational resources to use with students. KEYWORDS: Teachers' training, Online learning, Virtual classroom, Tutor, Open educational resources, Competences, EQF, EUCIP, e-CF.

LABSTRACT
L'articolo presenta l'esperienza dei corsi Sloop2desc in Italia, corsi che hanno coinvolto oltre 600 insegnanti, in maggioranza di informatica. I dati forniti evidenziano come si sia trattato di corsi fortemente caratterizzati dalle interazioni fra persone e collaborazione la produzione di risorse didattiche aperte da usare con gli studenti. KEYWORDS: Formazione docenti, Formazione in rete, Classe virtuale, Tutor, Risorse didattiche aperte, Competenze, EQF, EUCIP, e-CF.

1. THE ITALIAN CONTEXT

Too often, the Italian school is perched on the old model of transmission of teaching: the lecture still has the lion's share of teaching, the student has the role of listener-performer only to explain procedures in detail, but rarely is asked to participate in building his/her own knowledge. A first element that hinders educational innovation is to be found in some "laziness" of teacher's category, which not being stimulated by economic or social recognition, it hardly keeps up the onerous commitment to change their way of teaching, both through the 'use of new technologies, both through the overturning of the old model "teacher-centered". The second factor hindering change is the lack of training courses that are truly effective in helping teachers to "reprogram" the way they teach. In particular: we have repeatedly stated the importance of a competence-based didactics, but how can you actually do it? Finally, as regards the integration of online education and face-to-face learning, there remains the problem of teaching resources. Although the network is an almost inexhaustible source of materials, and perhaps for this reason, it is difficult for the teacher and the student to navigate through the sea of educational proposals, which are almost never actually reusable, missing the opportunity to change and adapt them to specific school contexts. The Sloop2desc project has tried to give an initial response to these needs intertwining several themes: the 1

use of online learning to complement face-to-face training, the sharing of open digital resources and competence-based learning.

2. COURSES AND TRAINEES

As envisaged in the original plan, the transfer action of the project has had its focus in Italy. The courses in Slovenia and Romania have had the role of testing the transnational effectiveness of the approach chosen, but it is in Italy that the goal was the training of a large number of trainees. The training was implemented in two phases [1]: pilot courses: from 23 February to 27 June 2010, cascade courses: between November 2010 and May 2011. The pilot courses have been advertised through notices in schools in Sicily and Lombardy, with the support of the Educational Committees of these two regions, and through the network. The proposal primarily addressed teachers of computer science, but all those who applied to participate were received, among them a small number of people outside the two regions and some noncomputer persons engaged in University or private training. In total the trainees enrolled in the pilot course were about 60. The cascade courses - where tutoring was supported by a group of trainees selected from the pilot course were advertised over the network at national level and were supported with communications to schools by the two regional Educational Committees. The goal was to

Giovanni FULANTELLI, Lucian OPREA reach 400 teachers (primarily computer science teachers). The applicants were more than 1,700: teachers from secondary schools (but not only) of all disciplines, demonstrating a strong interest in the themes of the course and a great need of training even though in the absence of incentives or formal recognition. All the applications of computer science teachers and mathematics teachers, in some way involved in teaching computer science, were accepted: to them teachers of other disciplines were also added to reach the total of 547 trainees. Ten classes - with the names of victims of the Mafia, as a tribute to them and the tenacious will to remember: Paolo Borsellino, Agostino Catalano, Eddie Walter Cosina, Dicillo Rocco, Giovanni Falcone, Vincenzo LiMuli Emanuela Loi, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani, Claudia Traina - were each assigned two tutors, selected from participants in the pilot courses. 6 classes were composed mainly of computer science and electronics teachers, 3 of mathematics teachers and 1 of Italian and foreign languages teachers. An eleventh class was then added to them: Peppino Impastato, consisting of teachers of business administration, for possible connections with an experiment in progress by three Commercial Technical Institutes (programmers specializations): Romanazzi in Bari, Baffi in Rome and Fermi in Pontedera. Such course comes out of the consideration that the syllabus of this specialization mainly covers the EUCIP core syllabus and therefore the proposal is to make the students acquire such certification at the end of a threeyear course. Business teachers are responsible, under that logic, for the training related to the Plan area.

Case-study Italy It seemed therefore interesting to support this experiment involving a large group of teachers of Business in the training path related to EUCIP core. This eleventh class had a small number of trainees (about half of the others) and was entrusted to a single tutor.

3. THE PILOT COURSE

The two pilot courses started with a meeting in presence and had another two additional face-to-face meetings: an interim and a final one. Here you find the analysis of data concerning the course in Lombardy, but what is reported is also valid for the Sicilian course.

3.1 Participation and dropouts

The trainees were over 40, but some of them did not take part even in the face-to-face meeting and others, after this meeting, have never entered the online environment. We therefore refer only to the 33 students who entered at least once in the platform. Of these, seven have never gone beyond Module 1 and, in general, have only started it (five under two hours and a half, one four hours and another six hours): a trainee has entered Module 2, but with a total connection time of of an hour. Two have been present throughout the course but, again, one for a total of of an hour and the other for a total of 3 hours. A total of 10 students, almost 30%, have just looked out to the course but have not actually taken part in it. All this is shown in the figure below, where the columns indicate the connection time for each of the 33 students for each module.

Figure 1. Connection Time of 33 trainees. We therefore limit our analysis to the remaining 23 participants (Figure 2). They all have arrived at the conclusion of the course even though four have not participated in the creation of OERs. Thus, the 70% who decided to take the course after seeing what it was like, 100% has arrived at the end and 82% has completed it as required (57% compared to 33 who have started). 2 How can we evaluate this data? The dropouts concentrated in the very first stage of the course: people who rated the course as not relevant to their interest or too difficult or too challenging. Those who considered the course of interest did not generally change their minds along the way but remained until the end even though, in some limited

Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences cases, without accepting the collaborative involvement in the production of OERs. The merit of such constant presence - for a long time - in our opinion is due to the pleasant climate of interaction and the feeling, made explicit by many participants, to be actually learning something useful for their professional practice. Many trainees often apologized that they couldn't devote to the course as much time as they wanted, and they thought necessary, because of work and family commitments. A working time of at least 2-3 hours a week, then between 32 and 48 hours for the 16-week course had been indicated. Sixteen students have exceeded 40 hours, three of those who also participated in the production of OER were under 32. Eight spent over 70 hours online (i.e over 5 hours per week). But these figures show only the connection time in Moodle, do not include the work in the production of materials or contacts among trainees in other settings, sometimes - for students of the same school or in the same city - even in the presence.

Figure 2. Time connection of the 23 active trainees.

3.2 Interactions
The data relating to posts in the Forum provides only a partial measure of the interactions occurred. In the two collaborative phases of Module 2 and Module 5, the trainees were, in fact, called to interact via email, phone, Skype and Web 2.0 environments. But the interactions occurred with other instruments are not measurable, so we give only the data related to the forum, which, however, show how the expected level of interaction has been achieved. The table on the right shows the number of open discussions and the total number of messages. A very large number, reflecting the fact that a course based on strong relationships between tutors and students and within their peer group has succeeded. Figure 3 is the result of an analysis performed on the flow of communication in the first three modules. In this sociogram, each node represents a participant; if two nodes are connected by an orange line that means that one of the two students has commented, at least once, a post written by the other trainee. If the line is blue, it means that the interaction occurred in both directions. The analysis of this graph also allows you to identify the 3

role of individual trainees in the virtual classroom (community). N discussions General Forum Coffee Area Mod 1 Forum Mod 2 Forum Mod 3 Forum Mod 4 Forum Mod 5 Forum (1) Mod 5 Forum (2) Total 42 15 17 10 13 8 17 17 139 N posts 347 108 348 439 381 118 133 370 2.244

(Forum 5 had two forums, one for group discussion, one for general discussion).

According to J. Nielsen [2], user participation in most online communities more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but

Giovanni FULANTELLI, Lucian OPREA don't contribute), 9% of users contribute from time to time, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. An analysis in this direction was made in the first two months of the course. Figure 3 shows the graph of the messages sent by each participant. If the chart followed the law of 09/01/90 it should be fairly flat (at around ten messages). Indeed, even if there are two peaks on the left (corresponding to two hyperactive trainees) the graph is not flat but rather almost triangular. This distribution is evidence that we are in the presence of what we might call a 'community effect': the trainees intervene not because they are obliged to but because they are willing to. This trend was confirmed in the subsequent months of the course.

Case-study Italy right colours to celebrate 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy - indicates their origin from various parts of the country. The prevalence of trainees from the South is probably due to the location of the promoter, the ITDCNR, Palermo, and a strong involvement of the Educational Committees of those regions in promoting the initiative.

Figure 5. The distribution of trainees by gender. Regarding the distribution of trainees by gender, it follows closely that of upper secondary teachers (of which 59.3% are women - a source Eurostat 2002). The high prevalence of some disciplines derives from the selection criteria described above. Figure 3. Pattern of relations (in the first three modules). As you can see most of the students have interacted with many other participants in the forum. Only a few nodes are isolated, which not necessarily indicate people who have been on the edge of the course: it is because someone has used more direct means of communication other than the forum, and because some trainees, who were especially engaged in the first module in individual study and observation of the dynamics, got also engaged in collaborating with others in Module 5 where they were expected to develop resources.

Figure 6. The distribution of trainees by discipline.

4. CASCADE COURSES

4.1 The tutoring in the cascade courses

The tutors in the cascade courses have been, as mentioned, some of the participants of the pilot course. To support them in their work and to maintain the tutoring of 11 classes as homogeneous as possible, the tutors of the pilot courses have played a role of supermentors. These have interacted with the tutors of the cascade courses in two ways: with a few meetings in Skype, before and during the coyrse, and through a dedicated forum on the project website. Again some numbers provide evidence of a strong and continuous interaction, 91 discussions initiated (sometimes by the super-mentors, tutors sometimes) with a total of 1,012 posts! Unlike the pilot courses, the geographic distribution of trainees has not allowed to start the course with a face4

Figure 4. The distribution of trainees in Italy. The 11 cascade courses have involved 547 participants selected from among more than 1,700 who had applied for participation. The picture below - with the

Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences to-face meeting, or to hold in-progress meetings, which are generally important for the creation of harmony and team spirit among the trainees and tutors, to ensure both the sharing of the course objectives and methodology of work. Some tutors have partly compensated that promoting 'virtual' meetings using Skype or other tools. the network) have shown more interest for the modules with a higher reference to teaching innovation: Module 4 on competence-based learning and Module 5 on course design and development of teaching resources.

4.3 Connection Time

From the data collected in different virtual classrooms, a mixed picture emerges as for the connection time linked to the activities proposed in the Module, but also, perhaps, linked to expectations, the difficulties arising from the issues addressed, previous experiences, motivation, etc., of each participant. As a first example see the graph below concerning Module 1, which compares the total connection time in hours (y-axis) in eight virtual classrooms (x-axis).

4.2 Participation and dropouts

The chart below shows the percentage of participants per module (as distinct from IT and teachers of other subjects). The "never" item collects the percentage of those who, while enrolled in the course, have never connected to the platform

Figure 7. Participation. Unlike what occurred in the pilot course, here there has been a constant rate of dropouts passing from Module 1 to Module 2 and from Module 2 Module 3; this rate decreases from Module 4 to and Module 5. We see this in detail: only 5% of computer teachers enrolled in the class has not entered the course, against 16% among noncomputer teachers; ie: 95% of the computer teachers have entered the first module, while only 84% of the non-computer teachers have entered Module 1. 73% of the computer teachers and 61% of noncomputer teachers have arrived at the second module; 49% vs. 51% has arrived at the third Module; 39% vs. 44% has arrived at the fourth Module; finally, 31% versus 39% has arrived at the fifth Module Interesting is the reversal that occurs between the computer teachers and the non-computer teachers: for non-computer the dropout rate decreases: 64% of those who entered Module 2 has also entered Module 5. In contrast, only 43% of the computer teachers who have entered Module 2 have arrived at Module 5. One can perhaps speculate that many non-computer teachers, after having registered, got scared, may be either due to EUCIP reference, or because the first modules equired a certain expertise in the use of computer and the web: elements rather reassuring for computer teachers. Instead, those non-computer teachers that have passed the initial difficulties (perhaps because already experts in the use of 5 Figure 8. Connection Time in Module 1. It is obvious that except for a classroom (Schifani) which recorded activities for about 2500 total hours, in the other classes the connection times is much lower: less than 500 hours. In the next graph we show the connection time, in hours, of each participant in the classroom 'Catalan' for Module 1. The difference in participants' connection times is obvious: it goes from a minimum of several minutes to peaks of 17 hours.

Figure 9. Connection time of individual trainees of one class in Module 1. The analysis of the total connection time for each module within the same classroom is used to confirm the heterogeneity, but also to trace the activity of the module

Giovanni FULANTELLI, Lucian OPREA that led to a greater number of working hours on the network. In the chart below concerning the classroom 'Catalano' we see the peak of connections in relation to the activities of Module 2, while in Module 5 there is a fall in the time spent online.

Case-study Italy

Figure 12. Connection time in the several Modules. It should be noted that data on the total connection time of one or more classes per module do not indicate, in itself, the object of the connection: it is possible, for example, that during the period, formally dedicated to a Module, some participants were still working on the previous module. In addition, the comparison between the time devoted to a Module or the other does not take into account the dropout rate: the time spent on a module depends not only on individual time, but also on the number of trainees. Here (Fig 13) are, for example, some data from a single class, "Impastato", a small class composed of teachers of Business Administration (with only one tutor). Of the 21 members only 16 have entered at least once the platform and they are the ones on whom we have carried out the analysis. Four of these, however, have only just entered the platform, while twelve are those who have actually attended the course. So in short: 23% were registered but did enter the course, another 19% were limited to a transient stay, for a total of 42%. A consistent data with what had been recored in the pilot course and similar to what has happened in the other 10 cascade courses. One thing to think about and which refers to the 'learning compact' agreed on at the time of enrolment in an online course. It seems obvious that the gratuity has led many to enrol without assessing if they would have time to participate effectively and without considering subscribing to deprive others the opportunity to participate (in fact, ton the basis of the experience of the pilot course, we have accepted 40 % registrations more than 400 expected). The dropout rate must therefore be calculated on those who have actually started the course, 12 in the case of this class. Of these, only 2, 16%, - for personal reasons and overlapping of commitments - have not completed the course. The others have all arrived at the fifth Module, although only 8 (64%) have concluded with the production of educational resources.

Figura 10. Connection time in a classroom for each Module. In the classroom 'Loi' the peak of connections in relation to the activities of Module 2 is confirmed, but the minimum number of hours of online activity is found in the activities related to Module 4.

Figure 11. Connection Time of another class for each Module. The very nature of the topics covered in Module 2, 'Being an online tutor and using Web 2.0 tools', in part provides a justification for the increased online activity of the participants. If the data on the activities of Module 1 of the classroom 'Schifani' are compared to a value close to that of the other classrooms (500 hours total connection), you get a further confirmation that Module 2 has seen a commitment in the virtual classroom greater than that present in the other modules. In the graph the percentage of online work develops as follows: Module 1 (20%), Module 2 (29%), Module 3 (19%), Module 4 (12%), Module 5 (20%).

Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences

Fig. 13. Trainees' Connection time per Module (one class). The graph of Figure 14 confirms that, for this class, the greater commitment of time was the time spent on Module 2. Module 4 Module 5 + group forum Total 13 12 4 176 221 108 450 1633

The class Li Muli was instead a class of computer teachers. Forum General Coffee Area Module 1 Module 2 Module 3 Module 4 Fig. 14. Total time per Module of the class"Impastato" Module 5 + group forum Total N. discussions 3 12 4 22 9 7 6 14 77 N. posts 54 87 132 451 176 166 60 389 1505

4.4. Interactions
As the pilot courses also cascade courses have been characterised by strong interactions based on collaborative activities. Here too, we assume two classes as an example. The class Schifani was 'atypical', as composed of teachers of Italian and foreign languages. And it is just this classwhich had significantly a higher total time of connection. Here are the number of threads and posts to forums. Forum General Coffee Area Module 1 Module 2 + 9 group forums Module 3 N. discussions 15 13 10 31 63 15 N. posts 102 64 71 203 336 178

5. THE PRODUCTION OF OERs

In Module 5 trainees are asked to cooperate to produce Moodle courses (and individual resources to be included in them) to use with their students. This request is functional to place students in situations as a way of promoting competence development (see Chapter 3), but also to create conditions for achieving effective transfer of innovation. The goal was to have, at the end of the course, teachers prepared to plan and run online competence-based teaching paths and develop educational resources available for that activity. When we refer to educational resources we mean open educational resources, thus: released with a copy-left license, leaving freedom of use, modification and diffusion, edited, with access to any source and then into an editable format (possibly open format), 7

Giovanni FULANTELLI, Lucian OPREA easy to find (and just in the view of sharing resources the FreeLOms repository has been created). Thus it is important to analyse whether and how such a result has been reached.

Case-study Italy the resources produced in the pilot course or in the previous project Sloop). A simple glance at the tag indicates the spectrum of topics, sufficiently different to be considered as the achievement of one of the aims of the project: to have available a wealth of materials to which you can access for designing online courses. The core ECDL syllabus is well covered, but also many points of EUCIP core and IT Administrator syllabuses are covered (the tags are partly in Italian and partly in English because they have been entered like that by the trainees).

5.1 OERs developed in the pilot course

In the two pilot courses, the trainees have developed the following materials: 15 SCORM packages related to Informatics content, 5 videos related to Informatics content; various learning resources for other subjects (in SCORM, doc, pdf and other formats); 4 courses on the Moodle platform; a course for IT Administrator, Module 1, Hardware (almost complete); a course on the topic Network layer, item 4.5 of Module 4, Expert use of the networks, of IT Administrator; a course on databases, the Build area of EUCIP Core, item B2; a course on Educational uses of the Web 2.0 tools.

5.2 Informatics OERs developed in the cascade courses

Proper terminology would ask to distinguish between informatics teaching and teaching of computer science and application programs. But the boundaries are not always so clear and, in particular, the teaching programs of the different disciplines of the reformed twoyears course: "Informatics", "Mathematics with Computer", "Information Technology", "Information and Communication "," Computer and laboratory "- often show a mix of informatics competences. So we will catalogue here 'informatics resources' both of the first and the second type. A high number of resources have been developed. Referring only to Moodle courses, they are as follows: 3 ECDL courses: two on spreadsheet and one on OpenOffice; 3 courses related to the area of Plan core: project management, business plans, types of organizations and their structures; 2 courses related to EUCIP Core: Information Technology and Computer Architecture; 3 courses related to IT Administrator: Modules 1, 2 and 4; 3 courses in programming; 5 courses on databases; 5 courses on the design and production of web pages; 1 course on Linux; 2 courses in electronics: operational amplifiers and power supplies and switching regulators. To these many other single LOs, used as components of those courses, must be added. FreeLOms currently contains 75 informatics resources and 27 computer use resources (also including 8

Fig. 15. Tags of Informatics resources. The rationale behind SLOOP is that of sharing resources so that every teacher should not start from scratch but can reuse and change what has been done by a colleague. So no matter if many of the courses are still incomplete products, no matter even if some, in the present state, are not yet ready to be used with students. What matters is that it has been forming a community that is sharing resources and which may, in the coming years, improving and enriching a community

Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences where other teachers will join. And it is in this perspective that we can analyse strengths and weaknesses (thus need for improvement) of the resources produced. We can analyse them in the view of these characteristics: openness and reusability, multimedia, interactivity, stimulus to relations and cooperation. With regard to the concept of openness and reusability the courses have been released under Creative Commons license (by-sa and by-nc-sa) and have been uploaded into the repository FreeLOms, providing them with full accessibility. In many cases, the file inserted in the FreeLOms is the one to be used to make changes: for Moodle courses it is needed, of course, to import the zip file (created as a back-up) in a Moodle platform. When there is a file distinct from the source files to use, for example in the case of products with quizzes or HotPotatoes eXeLearning IT products, the source has been uploaded with its related resource. With regard to multimedia it must be said that the trainees have not used it much. The materials produced are mainly composed of texts accompanied by pictures. The video-tutorial courses are generally inserted into objects already existing on the network, and this responds to the philosophy of reuse. When the trainees had to develop something new they generally relied on simple texts, may be because it was the fastest way to prepare them, may be because they believed they had sufficient skills in the use of audio and video or, may be, they didn't reflect enough on the pedagogical use of different media. Similarly with regard to interactivity. This is essentially limited to simple tests both with simple feedback like "right" and "wrong" and corrective feedback. Concerning the relational and collaborative dimension all courses have at least one forum, but it is not generally described as it should be used, which stimuli for discussions and which proposals for collaborative work students should be provided with. Little has been planned to exploit the potential provided by the wiki. In some cases the proposed activities do not expect students to work directly on platform, but on the contrary they refer to a face-to-face dimension. An analysis of they way how the resources have been developed would seem to suggest that teachers are more focused on content rather than on the relational dimension offered by the platform; the learning resources are online, but the educational dialogue continues to be largely confined to the teacher-student relationship that is established in the classroom. From propositional logic to Boolean algebra (class Montinaro), Today ... conics (class Traina), Statistics (Class Loi). The table below shows the topics covered. Units Conics 1. History of conics 2. Parables 3. Circumferences 4. Ellipsis 5. Hyperbole 6. Applications to algebra (equations and inequalities) 7. Applications on economics (problems of choice) 8. Polarity 1. Introduction 2. The numbering systems in the human history 3. The positional numbering systems 4. The operations with numbering systems 5. The binary system 6. The Logic Circuits 7. Evaluation and self-assessment 1. Elements of set theory 2. Communication, natural language and mathematical language 3. Propositional logic 4. The logic: in-depth paths 5. The logical networks 6. Models of communication 7. The Boolean algebra in Geogebra

The number systems

From propositional logic to Boolean algebra

Today...conics! 1.Conics and physics 2. Conics and the economy 3. Conics and matrices 4. Conics and the arts 5. Conics and architecture 6. I see ...conics! (WebQuest) Statistics and probability 1. Probability 2. Descriptive Statistics 3. Combinatorics

5.3 Mathematics OERs in the cascade courses

In the classes formed with mathematics teachers, five Moodle courses have been developed, all issued under a Creative Commons license (by-sa and by-nc-sa) Conics (class Loi), The number systems (class Borsellino),

In general, the courses, except for the one on statistics and probability (which contains materials but the course has just been sketched), consist of the following items: Presentation of the course. List of learning units. Learning objectives (course and / or teaching unit). Learning resources for each teaching unit (SCORM, texts, web pages, links, presentations, videos). Evaluation and Self-evaluation tests (at the end of the course and / or at the end of each unit). Four of the courses offered are complete with a well-defined structure, sometimes with a precise schedule, ready to be used as they are, or they can be 9

Giovanni FULANTELLI, Lucian OPREA modified, since all have been made available in FreeLOms. The tools that the trainees have used are mainly links to videos, video lessons and Web sites, from the perspective of reuse, but there was also a massive production of materials made from scratch: many texts and presentations, interactive tests, self-satisfaction questionnaires, videos, interactive charts produced with GeoGebra, for a total of 36 SCORMs. The teachers, as course authors, have given greater importance to education than to technology, providing clear objectives, materials relevant to the learning objectives, activities to be carried out by students either online or with paper and pen. Interesting in this respect the web quest "Today conics" which implies collaborative learning. The interactivity is quite high in the two courses on conics thanks to the forum and interactive tests (also present in the other two courses); interactivity is also promoted by GeoGebra dynamic graphs that students can manipulate to verify certain properties, or that they can r create themselves (for example, it is required to build a plant of the dome by Guarini of the Holy Shroud).

Case-study Italy The title is "What mood are you in ...?" and the argument involves the 4 skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading. The focus is on the use of adjectives to describe personalities.

The group Schifani SP 5-2 Plurilingualism has created a path to learn the art of writing a story beginning with a well-known fairy tale, 'Little Red Riding Hood'. The languages involved are: French, Spanish, German and Italian. From a simple structure / narrative tale the course leads to the creation of a narrative text .

5.4 Foreign languages OERs produced in the cascade courses

The class named Schifani, composed of teachers of Languages: L2 Italian, French, English, German and Spanish, has developed educational resources and courses in the light of the European Framework for Languages, choosing among the different levels of competences and developing useful learning resources to achieve them. Inside the course 4 working groups were formed and each group has developed a Moodle course where the all resources have been collected. Each course is described by a plan highlighting themes, goals, objectives, time, expected results in terms of knowledge, skills and competences, the course structure and the license under which the course is to be released and the learning resources developed. Here is a summary of the themes and resources developed by the 4 groups.

The group Schifani SP 5-3 Italian L2 has developed a learning path to make student familiar with the different text genres and styles of communication in various media. The resource offers an example of an activity of rewriting and transcoding.

The group Schifani SP 5-1 Anjin has created a Module for students of English level A2 of the CEFR, supplied with resources, activities and tests. 10

Sloop2desc - Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective to Develop European Skills and Competences The group Schifani 5-4 SP - Plurilingualism proposes a course of comparative culture and civilization in English and French. Starting from simple "prize de notes", you'll learn how to tell a journey, a past event. The course is divided into four units: Let's discover London. Les mdias en France. Un voyage travers la chanson. Bon apptit en France. Even these educational resources can be assessed by at least three main indicators: capability, relevance of instruments used for educational purposes, guidelines for their use. The functionality from the purely technological point of view is present in almost all of the resources developed and this is a proof of the mastery of the various tools / software proposed in the course. For some resources, on the contrary the mix of instruments used does not provide a clear identification of how to follow the learning path, creating some confusion in terms of tasks / activities. In short we can say that the aims of the course, especially those related to the knowledge of the various Web 2.0 tools, have been met more than satisfactory, but some resources still need to be accompanied by some methodological guidelines before being made available to students. The integration of face-to-face and and online learning is not just a matter of preparing digital material made accessible to students from home or in the laboratory. What's more, these materials cannot be just texts and images in digital format rather than paper. Online teaching should provide something that the classroom ca not provide, such as the ability to manipulate / create objects (whether graphics, text, pictures, ...), the ability to intervene with conjectures and proposed solutions, the ability to search online for ideas and topics, the ability to employ a discovery-approach. And this is what, in most of the materials produced by the trainees is missing: was it matter of the short time available or underestimation of this aspect? In proposing the course Sloop2desc we will devote more attention to this issue. With regard to competence-based didactics, as we expected, the teachers of computer science and the language teachers have based their courses on European standards, this is due to the fact that for their disciplines there are recognized competence frameworks. The others found more difficult to transpose the standards to their teaching subjects. Finally, as regards the issue of sharing and reuse we can be satisfied with the amount and quality of resources produced and made available. In particular we note that currently in our repository there are 35 full courses, as well as hundreds of individual LO freely usable and modifiable. We believe we have given with this course, a small but significant contribution to the growth of a community of teachers able to discuss the issues and teaching methodologies, to share resources and collaborate on developing educational paths, a "community where individual competences can become a collective wealth "[3].

5. CONCLUSIONS
The Sloop2desc course objectives were manifold: to propose a model of integration between face-toface learning and based-competence learning, to make teachers able to use software for the production of digital material and virtual environment, to induce reflection on the validity, effectiveness and attractiveness of digital resources and online courses, to encourage teachers to contribute to the creation of a repository of materials used and modified freely according to the philosophy of sharing and reuse. We can say that these objectives have been achieved, although not always in a complete.

REFERENCES
[1] Masseroni M. Gentile M., Taibi D., Sloop2desc: uniniziativa di formazione degli insegnanti su eLearning e didattica delle competenze, in Bricks, numero zero, March 2011. [2] J. Nielsen, Partecipation inequality:Encouraging More Users to Contribute, in Alertbox, october 9, 2006, [3] Berengo F, L'uso delle tecnologie nella didattica della matematica: l'esperienza dell'ITSOS "Marie Curie", in Form@re, N. 38, October 2005.

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