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

Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative

My Teaching and Administrative Experience in the Middle East: A Cultural Perspective

This paper explores the evolution of my experience in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) culminating in my current employment as an administrator and instructor in Saudi Arabia. It focuses on TEFL as my passion for more than 20 years and highlights the impact that my various TEFL roles have had on my teaching strategies throughout my academic professional career various institutions. This paper emphasizes that despite the teacher\u27s vast experience in designing courses, training teachers and teaching at all levels, new cultural contexts, students\u27 expectations as well as the dynamics of divergent administrator/teacher/student cultural perspectives (especially when the administrator/teacher represents a minority culture) present great challenges to successful interpersonal, educational and administrative approaches. Working with students from Saudi Arabia has brought a change in my teaching perspectives and techniques due to their unique social environment, religious beliefs, historical educational approach and family orientation

Linked Data based video annotation and browsing for distance learning

We present a pair of prototype tools that enable users to mark up video with annotations and later explore related materials using Semantic Web and Linked Data approaches. The �first tool helps academics preparing Open University course materials to mark up videos with information about the subject matter and audio-visual content. The second tool enables users, such as students or academics, to find video and other materials relevant to their study

Interlinking educational data to web of data

With the proliferation of educational data on the Web, publishing and interlinking eLearning resources have become an important issue nowadays. Educational resources are exposed under heterogeneous Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in different times and formats. Some resources are implicitly related to each other or to the interest, cultural and technical environment of learners. Linking educational resources to useful knowledge on the Web improves resource seeking. This becomes crucial for moving from current isolated eLearning repositories towards an open discovery space, including distributed resources irrespective of their geographic and system boundaries. Linking resources is also useful for enriching educational content, as it provides a richer context and other related information to both educators and learners. On the other hand, the emergence of the so-called "Linked Data" brings new opportunities for interconnecting different kinds of resources on the Web of Data. Using the Linked Data approach, data providers can publish structured data and establish typed links between them from various sources. To this aim, many tools, approaches and frameworks have been built to first expose the data as Linked Data formats and to second discover the similarities between entities in the datasets. The research carried out for this PhD thesis assesses the possibilities of applying the Linked Open Data paradigm to the enrichment of educational resources. Generally speaking, we discuss the interlinking educational objects and eLearning resources on the Web of Data focusing on existing schemas and tools. The main goals of this thesis are thus to cover the following aspects: -- Exposing the educational (meta)data schemas and particularly IEEE LOM as Linked Data -- Evaluating currently available interlinking tools in the Linked Data context -- Analyzing datasets in the Linked Open Data cloud, to discover appropriate datasets for interlinking -- Discussing the benefits of interlinking educational (meta)data in practice

Interactivity, the heart and soul of effective learning: The interlink between internet self-efficacy and the creation of an inclusive learning experience

There is a growing recognition that the relationship between digital technologies and education is more complex and multi-faceted than previously conceived. Given the multi-faceted nature of digital education, which involves social and technology elements in the realm of knowledge-acquisition, an epistemic community such as a community of inquiry (CoI) provides an appropriate theoretical perspective to frame the analysis of the interlink between internet self-efficacy and inclusive learning experiences. In recognition of the importance of active participation in the ubiquitous learning environment, the argument focused on the development of a CoI as an intellectual community that provides a structure for educators to implement digital education. Central to this article is the development of the various presences to sustain interaction and reflection in a socio-epistemological orientation approach. Notwithstanding the widely recognised affordances of digital technologies to connect people, this study was conducted to elicit relevant evidence on digital education, to gain insights into the practicality of digital education, to articulate several important research questions within each of the identified affordances, and to provide suggestions for institutions pursuing digital education. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that digital education is intertwined with digital capital and digital inclusion

Designing digital architecture with intelligent building for information access at the Tuberculosis Research Centre, Chennai

This paper focuses on how the digital architecture is being effectively used in the Tuberculosis Research Centre’s library for information access system making it more users friendly. More recently multi-media information retrieval systems have become vital with increased international attraction/attention. This will increase the end users and their platforms connected to the internet/intranet. Further this will explore the opportunities for research at the intersection of web and user’s information. Moreover this will bring out how simply the computational infrastructural tools are being utilized in remote access to reach publicly available information

Creating virtual communities of practice for learning technology in higher education: Issues, challenges and experiences

The need for a Web portal to support the rapidly growing field of learning technology has been well established through a number of national surveys and scoping studies over recent years. The overarching vision has been the provision of a virtual environment to assist in informing and developing professional practice in the use of learning technologies. This paper outlines the issues and challenges in creating such a portal through the experiences of developing the RESULTs Network. In the paper, design and participation issues are considered within the wider context of online and networked approaches to supporting practice and professional development. User participation methodologies and technical developments for RESULTs are described in relation to a review of existing representations of practice and a comprehensive survey amongst the learning technology users’ community. An outline of key achievements and experiences is presented, followed by some conclusions regarding the cultural and political issues in creating a viable and sustainable facility and suggestions for possible future direction in national provision

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