Collaborative OpenCourseWare Authoring: The SlideWiki Platform

The open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing of open courseware. The SlideWiki project is introducing the SlideWiki platform to different communities of educators and learners by 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

Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study in Open Education

Producing or finding and reusing high-quality educational content online can be a laborious and costly process. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. This paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community

Open Educational Resources in Public Administration: A Case Study in Greece

The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) for training in public administration has yet to see a wide adoption globally, mostly due to challenges related to the discovery and reuse of high-quality OER for training purposes. These challenges, combined with the general lack of openness in the public sector, have greatly impacted the penetration of OER in public administration. This paper presents a case study on the use of OER for expanding and enhancing curricular and resource sharing in public administration in Greece. Within this case study, an OER authoring and sharing platform was introduced to the Greek public sector, employing crowdsourcing methods for supporting trainers and trainees in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing OER. The paper presents the deployment of this platform and the use of OER in the context of training programmes in the Greek public sector and reports on the lessons learned and the impact on public administration. The results of the case study showed that the use of OER was very positively received by civil servants, with a remarkable response, through active participation and engagement that led to the enhancement of existing OER and the co-creation of new ones for public administration

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

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

Creation and refinement of Open Educational Resources in a self-experiment

Open Educational Resources (OER) versprechen einerseits den Abbau von Hürden im Bildungszugang und andererseits die Vermeidung redundanter Arbeit bei der Erstellung ähnlicher und gleichzeitig qualitativ hochwertiger Bildungsressourcen in unterschiedlichen Organisationen. Der Verbreitung von OER stehen jedoch bekannte Hürden gegenüber, wobei das ALMS-Framework einen Rahmen für die Bewertung der Wieder- und Weiternutzung von OER aus technischer Sicht bereitstellt. Ausgehend von einem Selbstversuch zur OER-Einführung werden in dieser Arbeit das ALMS-Framework erweiternde Anforderungen an OER basierend auf Konzepten aus Software-Entwicklung und technischem Schreiben definiert. Unter Beachtung dieser Anforderungen werden zwei OER-Projekte beschrieben: Zum einen wird die Weiterentwicklung eines Lehrbuchs unter Creative-Commons-Lizenz skizziert. Zum anderen werden Erstellung und Nutzung der neu entwickelten Software emacs-reveal für die Erzeugung von für das Selbststudium geeigneten, mit Audiokommentaren unterlegten HTML-Präsentationen beschrieben; die Präsentationen werden in einfachen Textdateien erstellt, wobei die Erzeugung von HTML-Code automatisiert in einer öffentlichen GitLab-Infrastruktur abläuft und damit die Software-Nutzung vereinfacht. Ergebnisse einer Umfrage unter Studierenden verdeutlichen die Vorzüge der erzeugten Präsentationen.Open Educational Resources (OER) promise to reduce entry barriers towards educational resources as well as to avoid redundant work when similar educational resources of high quality are created in different organizations. However, adoption of OER faces known challenges, and the ALMS framework provides evaluation criteria for the re-use of OER from a technical perspective. Starting from a self-experiment on OER adoption, novel requirements for OER based on the ALMS framework are defined by taking concepts from software engineering and technical writing into account. Respecting these requirements, two OER projects are reported: First, the creation of a new edition of a textbook under a Creative Commons license is sketched. Second, the development and use of a new software tool, called emacs-reveal, is described. This tool allows to generate HTML presentations with embedded audio explanations, which are suitable for self-study. The generation of HTML from simple text files takes place in a public GitLab infrastructure, increasing the software's ease of use. Students' responses to a questionnaire demonstrate advantages of generated presentations

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

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

Crowd-sourced Open Courseware Authoring with SlideWiki.org

While many Learning Content Management Systems are available, the collaborative, community-based creation of rich e-learning content is still not sufficiently well supported. Few attempts have been made to apply crowd-sourcing and wiki-approaches for the creation of e-learning content. In this article, we showcase SlideWiki -- an Open Courseware Authoring platform supporting the crowdsourced creation of richly structured learning content

Models of crowdsourcing in smart learning environments

Razvoj savremenih informaciono-komunikacionih tehnologija omogućio je proširenje mogućnosti podučavanja i učenja korišćenjem novih metoda i alata za unapređenje kvaliteta elektronskog obrazovanja. Pored toga, pametna obrazovna okruženja i internet inteligentnih uređaja su omogućili promene u pristupima podučavanju i učenju, kako u tradicionalnim okruženjima obrazovanja, tako i u okruženjima virtuelnih zajednica. Različiti novi koncepti kolektivne inteligencije i kolaborativnog učenja, još uvek nisu jasno teorijsko-metodološki uobličeni u kontekstu elektronskog obrazovanja i pametnih obrazovnih okruženja. Među tim konceptima je i crowdsourcing koji koristi znanje i veštine umrežene grupe ljudi da bi se izvršio crowdsourcing zadatak. Crowdsourcing se u primeni pokazao kao efikasna inovacija u učenju i podučavanju, naučnoistraživačkom radu i za rešavanje različitih problema u obrazovanju. Glavna hipoteza koja je razvijena i dokazana u okviru doktorske disertacije je da se razvojem i primenom modela crowdsourcing-a u pametnim obrazovnim okruženjima unapređuju performanse i kvalitet obrazovanja, povećava se motivisanost studenata i poboljšavaju se konačni rezultati obrazovnog procesa. U eksperimentalnom delu doktorske disertacije realizovana su tri istraživačka projekta na dve visokoškolske institucije, koja su za cilj imala validaciju predloženih modela crowdsourcing-a u različitim obrazovnim okruženjima. Rezultati evaluacije su potvrdili veliki potencijal predloženih modela i potvrđena je značajna spremnost studenata na kolaboraciju, kompetentnost za rešavanje postavljenih zadataka, proizvodnju kvalitetnih rešenja i visok nivo njihove samoorganizovanosti.The development of modern information and communication technologies has enabled the expansion of teaching and learning opportunities by using new methods and tools for improving the quality of e-education. In addition, smart learning environments and Internet of things have enabled changes in teaching and learning approaches, both in traditional educational environments and in virtual community environments. The various new concepts of collective intelligence and collaborative learning are still not clearly theoretically and methodologically formed in the context of e-education and smart learning environments. Among these concepts is crowdsourcing, that uses the knowledge and skills of a crowd to perform a crowdsourcing task. Crowdsourcing has proven to be an effective innovation in learning and teaching, scientific research work and in solving various educational problems. The main hypothesis that was developed and demonstrated in this dissertation was that development and implementation of crowdsourcing models in smart learning environments improve the performance and quality of education, increase the students' motivation and improve the final results of educational process. In the experimental part of the doctoral dissertation, three research projects were carried out in two higher education institutions aimed at validating the proposed crowdsourcing models in different educational environments. The results of the evaluation confirmed the great potential of the proposed models and showed students' willingness to collaborate, their competence for solving tasks and production of quality solutions, as well as high degree of their self-organization