Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

EASTWEB: building an integrated leading Euro-Asian higher education and research community in the field of the Semantic WEB

Based on the experience of the EC funded project EASTWEB, a project involving Universities from Italy (main partner), Austria, Ireland, Poland, China, India and Thailand, we describe a set of on going and planned collaboration activities. We highlight what we see the major advantages but also the difficulties in carrying out such a program

Shortcomings of learning design approaches and a possible way out

Shifting away from traditional instructional design to younger research streams like personalized, workflow-based or collaborative e-learning, learning design (LD) has become an important issue in the field of technology-enhanced learning. Nevertheless, current LD approaches turn out to be rather unhandy or costly in teaching and research practice. In this paper, we discuss these shortcomings and propose an alternative solution approach which is based on a web application mashup, learner interactions, and a semantic layer for tool recommendations. As the evaluation of our first prototype is in progress, we can not highlight first experiences, but outline benefits and possible application scenarios in this position paper

Language technology for eLearning

Given the huge amount of static and dynamic contents created for eLearning tasks, the major challenge for their wide use is to improve their retrieval and accessibility within Learning Management Systems. This paper describes the LT4eL project which addresses this challenge by proposing Language Technology based functionalities to support semi-automatic metadata generation for the description of the learning objects, on the basis of a linguistic analysis of the content. Se- mantic knowledge will be integrated to enhance the management, distribution and retrieval of the learning material. We will employ ontologies, key elements in the architecture of the Semantic Web initiative, to structure the learning material within Learning Management Systems, by means of the descriptive metadata. We will also explore the use of Latent Semantic Indexing techniques for the matching of the learning objects with the user information requirements.peer-reviewe

KoKoo (Kontent Kooration) Evolving a Content Curation System To a comprehensive Editorial backend platform

The aim of this paper is to show how a prototypal system, designed as a general purpose stand-alone content curation tool could be evolved by following some alpha user's feedbacks to an comprehensive multi-service platform. The widespread diffusion of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets as long as the availability of mobile wideband services are increasing day by day the number of players in the ICT Market. In such a scenario, following the user needs becomes a critical issue, since it is likely for the users. to find products and services quite similar to the one you are offering, better fulfilling their needs. KOKOO (KOntent + KOO(Ù)ration) is a comprehensive platform made by Telecom Italia R&D division. It is a solution for solving the growing content provider needs to find new and most interesting news to offer to other users on different media, aggregating them in a personal journal with a similar look and feel. Chapter 2 will show the old system (presented also at Nem Summit 2012 showcase), chapter 3 will present user feedbacks and chapter 4 will show the new system and all of its aggregated services, stressing how this was designed by following user feedback

Learning roadmap studio : new approaches and strategies for efficient learning and training processes

Learning systems have emerged in a set of different information systems, oriented for different kinds of organizations and institutions, such as learning management systems, knowledge management systems and learning content management systems, which can be integrated or merged with others. From past experience, it has been denoted that strategies and pedagogical processes are tasks that can be created, enriched and boosted by actors who participate in learning and training processes: course managers, teachers and students. The challenge posed to the different actors involved also accelerates the changes that have been happening in education and training, empowering a society based on knowledge. Initiatives such as eLearning (EU Comission 2000), eLearningEurope, eTwinning and Education Observatories are an evidence of this challenge. Platforms, applications, tools and systems must respond to challenges that those actors face nowadays: heterogeneous target audiences, in terms of student profiles, number of participants, differentiated contents and schedules to achieve knowledge, outcomes and competences. Thus, a prototype application, named Learning Roadmap Studio (LRMS), has been developed and deployed at Aveiro Norte Polytechnic School of the University of Aveiro, in order to suppress gaps in learning processes and to power better learning and training. It represents a new challenge for the University of Aveiro for higher education and is already being tested. At its core is the concept of “learning roadmaps” that act upon two fundamental axes: education and learning. For the teachers, it aims at becoming a self-supporting tool that stimulates the organization and management of the course materials (lectures, presentations, multimedia content, and evaluation materials, amongst others). For the students, the learning roadmap aims at promoting self-study and supervised study, endowing the pupil with the capabilities to find the relevant information and to capture the concepts in the study materials. The outcome will be a stimulating learning process together with an organized management of those materials. It is not intended to create new learning management systems. Instead, it is presented as an application that enables the edition and creation of learning processes and strategies, giving primary relevance to teachers, instead of focusing on tools, features and contents