OER Recommendations to Support Career Development

This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous and strategic about their own skill development. Subsequently, high-quality, on-line, personalized educational content and services are also essential to serve this high demand for learning content. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have high potential to contribute to the mitigation of these problems, as they are available in a wide range of learning and occupational contexts globally. However, their applicability has been limited, due to low metadata quality and complex quality control. These issues resulted in a lack of personalised OER functions, like recommendation and search. Therefore, we suggest a novel, personalised OER recommendation method to match skill development targets with open learning content. This is done by: 1) using an OER quality prediction model based on metadata, OER properties, and content; 2) supporting learners to set individual skill targets based on actual labour market information, and 3) building a personalized OER recommender to help learners to master their skill targets. Accordingly, we built a prototype focusing on Data Science related jobs, and evaluated this prototype with 23 data scientists in different expertise levels. Pilot participants used our prototype for at least 30 minutes and commented on each of the recommended OERs. As a result, more than 400 recommendations were generated and 80.9% of the recommendations were reported as useful.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of IEEE Frontiers In Education (FIE) 2020 by IEEE Xplor

Organization of Individual Work of Students in Blended Learning of Foreign Languages at Higher Educational Institutions

The purpose of the academic paper is as follows: to evaluate the effectiveness of individual work of students in blended learning of foreign languages at higher educational institutions in order to identify problems and prospects for autonomous learning. Methodology. The paper uses the online form of the questionnaire to conduct a survey of 260 students of Ukrainian universities in September-October 2020. The results demonstrate several important conclusions. Social-demographic characteristics of students affect the effectiveness of self-organization of students in the study of foreign languages with application of technologies. The basic problems of individual work of students in blended learning of foreign languages at HEI are determined as follows: technical and the need for support from a technical specialist; inconvenience of a blended learning system; the need for additional technical skills; the complexity of blended learning. The effectiveness of the learning process based on the system and technologies of blended learning has been also assessed at the average level

Rating Prediction based on Optimal Review Topics: A Proposed Latent Factors-Optimal Topics Hybrid Approach

Rating prediction is an inevitable problem which recommender systems (RS) need to address. Its goal is to accurately predict the rating a user will assign to a particular item. Predictions which utilize numerical ratings and review texts are biased and have low accuracy. Also, existing topic-based rating prediction approaches focus on finding the most preferred items through the identification of latent topics expressed in users’ review texts. Even though the latent topics seem to represent most user review texts, they do not necessarily capture each user’s preferences. The goal of this work is then to develop a more accurate model by considering product review texts analysis so as to gain additional preference knowledge. Hence, a hybrid algorithm that optimizes the latent topics is proposed.  Specifically, the proposed approach finds appropriate weights for the topics of each review text. Rating prediction is critical task for RS because slight performance enhancement of the prediction accuracy results into significant improvements in recommendations. Experimental evaluation over real-world datasets revealed performance improvements of the proposed approach compared to alternative models. The proposed model can be used by RS in various domain such as e-learning, movie and hotel rating

Pembelajaran Online Pendidikan Agama Islam: Peluang dan Tantangan di Sekolah Dasar

Kebijakan belajar dari rumah selama masa pandemi Covid-19 mengintruksikan proses pembelajaran PAI di sekolah dasar harus dilakukan secara online pembelajaran daring. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis peluang dan tantangan guru dan siswa dalam melaksanakan proses pembelajaran online PAI di masa pandemi Covid-19. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan deskriptif kualitatif. Subjek penelitian ini adalah guru kelas dan siswa kelas V SD dilingkungan KKG Gugus 1 Singawinata kabupaten Purwakarta. Teknik pengambilan sampel yang digunakan adalah purposive random sampling. Pengumpulan data menggunakan teknik wawancara dan dokumentasi. Analisis data menggunakan teknik triangulasi data. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa guru dan siswa mendapatkan beberapa peluang dan tantangan dalam melaksanakan proses pembelajaran PAI secara online di masa pandemi Covid-19.  Peluang untuk guru dan siswa sekolah dasar adalah (1) Kemampuan teknologi, (2) pembelajaran lebih mudah diakses, (3) memperluas referensi pembelajaran. Sementara itu, tantangan yang dihadapi oleh guru sekolah dasar dan siswa dalam pembelajaran online selama pandemi Covid-19 adalah (1) kesulitan mencapai pembelajaran tujuan, (2) gangguan jaringan, (3) biaya tingg

Online learning during the covid-19 pandemic: How is it implemented in elementary schools?

The Covid-19 pandemic that occurred forced the learning process to be carried out online or online learning. This study aims to analyze the opportunities and challenges of teachers and students who carry out the online learning process during the Covid-19 pandemic. This research uses a qualitative approach with a case study type. The subjects of this research were class teachers and grade IV elementary school students. The sampling technique used was purposive random sampling. Data collection techniques used interviews and documentation. The data obtained in this study were qualitative data which were analyzed using data triangulation techniques. The results showed that teachers and students got several opportunities and challenges implementing the online learning process during the Covid-19 pandemic. The opportunities for elementary school teachers and students are (1) Technology ability, (2) more accessible learning, (3) expanding learning references. Meanwhile, the challenges faced by elementary school teachers and students in online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic were (1) difficulty achieving learning objectives, (2) network disruption, (3) high cost

The use of accessibility metadata in e‑learning environments: a systematic literature review

E-learning environments constitute an essential element in education, as they help students to ensure their pass their courses and graduate on time. Although guidelines, techniques, and methods have been presented in some literature in recent years to contribute to the development of accessible e-learning environments that promote digital inclusion, their implementation is challenging. In this context, the use of accessibility metadata not only provides a way to enhance the description of adapted educational resources but also facilitates their search according to the needs and preferences of students, in particular those with disabilities. In this paper, a systematic review was conducted in order to provide the state of the art regarding the use of accessibility metadata in e-learning environments. A total of 746 documents were found during the period from 2012 to 2019, of which 31 were selected according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria relevant to our review. The findings revealed an intensive use of models and standards of accessibility in e-learning environments, however, using accessibility metadata remains underused. In fact, the evaluation of accessibility and adaptability through the use of its metadata was not found. The fndings obtained also helped to establish challenges and opportunities in this research feld as well as to provide an overview that could support those who generate educational resources to keep their interest in making them accessible.publishedVersio

Analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of E-learning from the Perspective of Experts in the Period of COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: Today, e-learning has become one of the basic components of education process, especially in higher education. Institutions and universities employ e-learning extensively in their educational operations. In light of this, the goal of the current research was to determine the advantages, disadvantages, possibilities, and dangers associated with e-learning in the Iranian higher education system.Method: The present research is applied in terms of purpose and with a qualitatively exploratory approach. The participants of present study were experts in the field of e-learning in public universities of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in 2021.Using purposive sampling and snowball sampling methods, 16 e-learning experts were selected as the participants. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and thematic analysis was employed to analyze the obtained data. Results: After analyzing the obtained data from the interview, the total number of 116 free codes were extracted from interviews content was 116 codes, which were classified in 18 concepts and finally were identified strengths (Use of office automation in universities, Establishment of information and communication technology centers in universities, Development of e-learning in universities, Familiarity of faculty members and students with virtual environments, The place of e-learning in upstream documents and university perspectives), weaknesses (Lack of proper infrastructure, equipment and facilities for e-learning, Lack of specialized manpower, Lack of formal regulations for e-learning in the field of higher education, Insufficient knowledge about e-learning), threats (Threats related to cost, facilities and time, Management threats, Threats to change the nature of the university, Threats related to interactions) and training opportunities (Increas access to e-learning, Expanding international and intercultural interactions, Environmental benefits, Providing economic opportunities , Development of educational justice) of e-learning in Iranian higher education system. Conclusion: Considering the research findings, to develop educational justice and the possibility of more population access to the University of the Student community, reviewing existing approaches and educational methods and using e-learning as a new educational strategy for higher education system are necessar

The application of recommender systems in education: a systematic literature review

O crescente interesse em pesquisas sobre sistemas de recomendações educacionais tem motivado o surgimento de novas técnicas e modelos nos últimos anos. Entretanto, as informações existentes sobre a diversidade de mecanismos utilizados para a produção de recomendações no contexto educacional são limitadas. Diante disso, este artigo apresenta uma revisão sistemática da literatura que sintetiza o conhecimento disponível sobre a forma que os recomendadores educacionais produzem as recomendações. Para tal foram selecionados 20 artigos publicados entre 2015 e 2019 de 517 publicações científicas identificadas. Os resultados fornecem conclusões sobre como os recomendadores educacionais funcionam apresentando um panorama das técnicas, entradas e saídas desses sistemas nas pesquisas mais recentes.The growing interest in educational recommender systems has motivated the emergence of new techniques and models in recent years. Despite this, there is limited information on a variety of mechanisms used by such systems to produce recommendations in the educational context. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review that summarizes the available knowledge on the operation of educational recommender systems. Through the execution of the systematic review, 20 research papers published between 2015 and 2019 were selected from an initial set of 517 studies. The results provide findings regarding how educational recommenders work by presenting a panorama of the techniques, inputs and outputs of these systems in the most recent research.Facultad de Informátic