LoCloud D4.5: Online Courses

A main objective of the LoCloud project is to ease the task of small and medium-sized heritage organisations across Europe in making their contents accessible to Europeana. An important part of LoCloud’s efforts is to facilitate the process of taking local data from heterogeneous data sources and transforming it into Europeana compliant data. This process involves understanding and interpreting metadata profiles, extracting data, setting harvesting infrastructure, managing vocabularies, enriching/completing data, mapping metadata profiles and more.

LoCloud has several work packages devoted to the development of software tools and micro-services that aim to simplify the content contribution and ingestion process from the perspective of both content providers and Europeana. Throughout the project, time and resources has been dedicated to the development, improvement and testing prototypes of these tools, and working with content providers.

The E-learning courses described in this report have been made with the intention of helping LoCloud content providing partners and cultural heritage organisations to utilize the technology implemented in LoCloud.  They aim to offer participants a rich, well-structured mean to get familiar with services and tools offered by the project.

This report documents the creation process of the courses as well as their contents and structure. The courses were created on the basis of other material provided to the  LoCloud  Support  Portal, including documentation and videos, as well as on the basis of training delivered to partners at the end of the second year of the project. The LoCloud courses were developed in the first half of the third year of the project. Later, these were reviewed by the project partners (both technical and content-providing), which resulted in a series of improvements being made before the release of the final version of the courses.

In total, three courses were made available, two renewed and updated versions of courses from previous projects (AccessIT/AccessITPlus) and the third one created specifically to cover the LoCloud offerings. The total amount of lessons in these courses is 41 and they correspond to a workbook of around a thousand pages in size. Beside text contents, these courses include also multimedia (including the LoCloud training videos) and interactive elements such as self-assessment quizzes.

All  the  LoCloud  courses  can  be  found  in  a  dedicated  e-learning  sub-portal,  available  at

http://support.locloud.eu/courses/.