Latvia/OER

Overview

Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in Northern Europe in the Baltic region. It is bordered to the north by Estonia, to the south by Lithuania, and to the east both by Belarus and the Russian Federation. Across the Baltic Sea to the west lies Sweden. The territory of Latvia covers 64,589 km² and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate.

The population of Latvia is 2,250,000.

The capital and largest city is Riga.

The Latvians are a Baltic people closely related to the Lithuanians, with the Latvian language sharing many similarities to Lithuanian. Today the Latvians and Lithuanians are the only surviving members of the Baltic peoples and Baltic languages of the Indo-European family. The modern name of Latvia is thought to originate from the ancient Latvian name Latvji, which may have originated from the word Latve which is a name of the river that presumably flowed through what is now eastern Latvia.

Latvia is a democratic parliamentary republic and is divided into 26 districts. Latvia has been a member of the United Nations since 17 September 1991, of the European Union since 1 May 2004 and of NATO since 29 March 2004.

Further information

For further general information see Wikipedia:Latvia/OER.

Education in Latvia/OER

For a general description of education in Latvia/OER see Education:Latvia/OER.

e-learning

For a description more focussed to e-learning see E-learning:Latvia/OER.

Internet in Latvia/OER

(Figures as of 2010) Fixed broadband coverage in Latvia stands only slightly lower than the EU average, although broadband coverage in rural areas with 67% remains an issue. Coverage remained stable in 2010, while broadband take up as a percentage of population went up to 19% compared with the EU average of 27%. Broadband connectivity showed the most significant improvement, reducing the gap with the EU average. A critical area in Latvia is low broadband take-up among businesses: Only 68% are connected. However, after no growth in 2009, this number grew by 5 percentage points in 2010. Wireless Internet is at an early stage of development. Rates of Internet use and non-use in Latvia are close to the EU average. Take-up of Internet services is also relatively high. Participation in the more popular activities such as looking for information about goods and services is close to the EU average and for a number of other services even higher. In particular, Latvia records particularly higher than average numbers using the Internet for reading online newspapers (+15 percentage points), Internet banking (+10 percentage points), uploading self-created content (+14 percentage points), and doing online courses (+3 percentage points). In contrast, the use of eCommerce by individuals is underdeveloped and has remained stable below 20%. Latvia has made substantial progress during last year in the provision of online services and now scores significantly above the average in both citizens services (at 89%) and businesses services (at 100%) online availability. The use of eGovernment has made also substantial improvements and now lies close to the EU average for both citizens (at 40%) and businesses (at 72%). (1)

OER Initiatives in Latvia/OER

National OER initiatives

As part of ESF Project, "Delivery of career education programmes in system of education” in 2007-2008 a data base NIID.LV was established. NIID.LV provides e-consulting (responses to received questions) about opportunities of education, publications of interpretative materials about education FAQ and summaries of actual education related information. NIID.LV stores interactive career choice tests as well. In 2009 Project was started to connect NIID.LV with EU portal about educational opportunities in Europe, PLOTEUS II. (1)

eLearning portal - www.eduspace.lv

The portal for eLearning materials was established to provide pupils, teachers and school administration with platform for placing, storage, classification, searching, of learning objects as well as to provide different tools that support teachers and school administration in day-to-day work. Initially the target audience of portal was pupils of 7th up to 12th grade (age 13-18). The portal consists of 3 parts: Public web-site based on DRUPAL content management system which provides access to public learning objects, possibility to register in portal, possibility to connect to eLearning environment as well as repository of learning objects. The eLearning environment is based on open source eLearning system Moodle. The access to this system is allowed only for authenticated users that are registered in one of school management systems e-klase.lv or Mykoob.lv. The users of these two systems are pupils, teachers, school administration and parents. Repository of learning objects – user interface for repository of learning objects is accessible through portal thereby providing accessibility to open access materials for public users, for teachers thereby providing access publish learning materials, for teachers, pupils and school administration provides search and assessment of materials, as well as parents have a possibility to follow up pupils school results and access to materials if they are interested. (1)

References

1. ReVica/VISCED page for Latvia (http://virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Latvia)

Reports

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