A collection of curricula from around the world: the Curricula Workstation is live
A collection of curricula from around the world: the Curricula Workstation is live
It was with the aim of creating a central point of access to curricula from around the world that the Georg Eckert Institute developed the Curricula Workstation, which went into its public beta phase in June 2013. This period has now come to a successful conclusion, and a robust, optimised version is available online athttp://curricula-workstation.edumeres.net.
The Curricula Workstation, a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and developed by a team of researchers, IT specialists and librarians at the GEI, provides a central point of access to school curricula from Germany and a range of other countries worldwide in print and electronic formats. The Workstation is a permanent facility for scholars, no matter where they are in the world, to conduct searches in a current total of almost 5,000 school history, geography, social studies/political education and ethics/religious education curricula. Users can run structured searches for curricula by entering the country they wish to search in, the applicable level of education, subject and year of issuance of the curriculum; alternatively, they can use the full-text search function to search those curricula which are available in electronic form. An additional benefit of the Curricula Workstation is the fact that it acts as a long-term archive for the digital curricula in the collection, a function their issuers are frequently unable to provide.
Throughout the course of the Curricula Workstation project, the team placed particular emphasis on involving users in the development process; before commencing work on the project, the researchers identified its target group’s needs by running workshops, and during the beta phase they used systematic evaluations and other methods to collect valuable feedback from users, directly implementing a large proportion of the suggestions and findings as they emerged. Some examples of improvements made to the Workstation on the basis of this feedback include the provision of extended help and descriptive text, adjustments in terms and labels used in the system and the ironing out of minor technical hitches. Thanks to users’ comments and suggestions, the Curricula Workstation was able to go live at the beginning of March 2014 in a robust, optimised version which is now permanently available to researchers wishing to search for and in curricula.
The Curricula Workstation is part of the Georg Eckert Institute’s strategy for the development of an up-to-date, user-centred digital research infrastructure at the institute. Other projects forming part of the strategy include the GEI-Digital project around the digitisation of historic textbooks (www.gei-digital.de), a database of textbooks for specific subjects approved for use in Germany (GEI-DZS, http://gei-dzs.edumeres.net), and Edumeres, an information and communication portal for research into educational media (www.edumeres.net).
The Curricula Workstation is available now at http://curricula-workstation.edumeres.net
