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

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

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

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