7 research outputs found

    Lessons learned from the use of the SlideWiki OpenCourseWare platform in different learning contexts

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    A major obstacle to increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material, i.e. OpenCourseWare (OCW). The creation of comprehensive OCW is often a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process, with the effect that courseware employed by educators and trainers can be incomplete and outdated, as well as inaccessible to those with disabilities. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared. Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner. SlideWiki has won the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award and is used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available on SlideWiki in different languages. The SlideWiki large-scale trial project is further maturing the SlideWiki platform by improving its usability and accessibility. The SlideWiki project is performing a wide range of trials covering different levels of education (i.e. from secondary to higher education) and different types of learning (i.e. formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning). Each of these large-scale trials is carried out with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in different countries across Europe. A particular focus of the technology development and testing in the trials is the suitability for academics, teachers and learners with disabilities. This paper will present the lessons learned from piloting the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts and scenarios. In particular, we will describe the learning scenarios considered in each pilot and how these scenarios have been implemented with the use of SlideWiki. We will then describe the methodology followed in each pilot, in terms of the authoring, teaching and learning activities performed by educators and learners using SlideWiki. Finally, the lessons learned from each pilot will be discussed, focusing on the challenges faced in each pilot, how these challenges have been addressed, as well as the best practices that have emerged from the pilots regarding the collaborative authoring and sharing of OCW

    A Semantics-based User Interface Model for Content Annotation, Authoring and Exploration

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    The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements with the aim of creating, publishing and interconnecting machine readable information have gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way in which humans interact with information. Semantic structuring of content on the other hand provides a wide range of advantages compared to unstructured information. Semantically-enriched documents facilitate information search and retrieval, presentation, integration, reusability, interoperability and personalization. Looking at the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data, we see quite some progress on the backend side in storing structured content or for linking data and schemata. Nevertheless, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is from our point of view the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this thesis, we propose a semantics-based user interface model, which aims to reduce the complexity of underlying technologies for semantic enrichment of content by Web users. By surveying existing tools and approaches for semantic content authoring, we extracted a set of guidelines for designing efficient and effective semantic authoring user interfaces. We applied these guidelines to devise a semantics-based user interface model called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) which enables integrated authoring, visualization and exploration of unstructured and (semi-)structured content. To assess the applicability of our proposed WYSIWYM model, we incorporated the model into four real-world use cases comprising two general and two domain-specific applications. These use cases address four aspects of the WYSIWYM implementation: 1) Its integration into existing user interfaces, 2) Utilizing it for lightweight text analytics to incentivize users, 3) Dealing with crowdsourcing of semi-structured e-learning content, 4) Incorporating it for authoring of semantic medical prescriptions

    Collaboratively Developing Open Educational Resources for Engineering Educators in SlideWiki

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    This paper reports on a study that was conducted to explore the potential of SlideWiki for collaborative content creation in a teacher education context. SlideWiki is a newly developed platform built on the Open Educational Re-sources (OER) ethos aiming to facilitate the collaboration around educational con-tent. In this study, 134 students (pre-service engineering educators) used SlideWiki to collaboratively develop OERs in the form of WebQuests. Students’ answers to a survey questionnaire were used to address their experience, while real interaction data from the SlideWiki platform were used to determine students’ participation in SlideWiki during the development of OERs both as individuals and as groups. The study yielded positive findings regarding students’ perceptions of the potential of SlideWiki to serve as an effective tool for collaboratively developing OERs and of its usefulness and effectiveness for supporting communities of educators. Also, assuming their future role as educators, students ex-pressed their intention to utilize SlideWiki in their practice. However, a discrepancy was noticed between students’ perceptions and their actual participation in SlideWiki (e.g. unequal distribution of workload among group members) that may be due to students’ lack of collaborative skills that need to be further cultivated

    Collaboratively Developing Open Educational Resources for Engineering Educators in SlideWiki

    No full text
    This paper reports on a study that was conducted to explore the potential of SlideWiki for collaborative content creation in a teacher education context. SlideWiki is a newly developed platform built on the Open Educational Re-sources (OER) ethos aiming to facilitate the collaboration around educational con-tent. In this study, 134 students (pre-service engineering educators) used SlideWiki to collaboratively develop OERs in the form of WebQuests. Students’ answers to a survey questionnaire were used to address their experience, while real interaction data from the SlideWiki platform were used to determine students’ participation in SlideWiki during the development of OERs both as individuals and as groups. The study yielded positive findings regarding students’ perceptions of the potential of SlideWiki to serve as an effective tool for collaboratively developing OERs and of its usefulness and effectiveness for supporting communities of educators. Also, assuming their future role as educators, students ex-pressed their intention to utilize SlideWiki in their practice. However, a discrepancy was noticed between students’ perceptions and their actual participation in SlideWiki (e.g. unequal distribution of workload among group members) that may be due to students’ lack of collaborative skills that need to be further cultivated

    Collaboratively Developing Open Educational Resources for Engineering Educators in SlideWiki

    No full text
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