Extracting Topics from Open Educational Resources

In recent years, Open Educational Resources (OERs) were earmarked as critical when mitigating the increasing need for education globally. Obviously, OERs have high-potential to satisfy learners in many different circumstances, as they are available in a wide range of contexts. However, the low-quality of OER metadata, in general, is one of the main reasons behind the lack of personalised services such as search and recommendation. As a result, the applicability of OERs remains limited. Nevertheless, OER metadata about covered topics (subjects) is essentially required by learners to build effective learning pathways towards their individual learning objectives. Therefore, in this paper, we report on a work in progress project proposing an OER topic extraction approach, applying text mining techniques, to generate high-quality OER metadata about topic distribution. This is done by: 1) collecting 123 lectures from Coursera and Khan Academy in the area of data science related skills, 2) applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on the collected resources in order to extract existing topics related to these skills, and 3) defining topic distributions covered by a particular OER. To evaluate our model, we used the data-set of educational resources from Youtube, and compared our topic distribution results with their manually defined target topics with the help of 3 experts in the area of data science. As a result, our model extracted topics with 79% of F1-score.Comment: Editted version of this paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) 2020 by Springer (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series

Internal and External Influences on the University Teachers in Semester System

There are so many influences a faculty member has to undergo at the higher education level in universities in semester system. We wanted to comb the universities for the internal and external influences on the university teachers and their consequences in Balochistan. It was done to determine the loss we bear due to the influences on the university teachers in Balochistan, and to generate such influence-free-mechanism in the universities of Balochistan to strengthen the educational milieu in the province. Faculty members play pivotal role in imparting the education at the higher education level in any country. They happen to be the nucleus of the education system. Disturbing and disrupting them in any was is, in effect, disturbing and disrupting the education process. Influencing them, directly or indirectly, halts the true teaching process. It creates many obstacles ranging from class boycotts, hunger strikes to processions and demonstrations either inside the institute or outside the institute. To forge such a composite mechanism not only to control these both internal and external factors in order to streamline the learning and imparting education process but also to afford a healthy and sound teaching environment