ICOPER Project - Deliverable 4.3 ISURE: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, embodied in the ICOPER CD&R

The purpose of this document is to capture the ideas and recommendations, within and beyond the ICOPER community, concerning the reuse of learning content, including appropriate methodologies as well as established strategies for remixing and repurposing reusable resources. The overall remit of this work focuses on describing the key issues that are related to extending effective reuse embodied in such materials. The objective of this investigation, is to support the reuse of learning content whilst considering how it could be originally created and then adapted with that ‘reuse’ in mind. In these circumstances a survey on effective reuse best practices can often provide an insight into the main challenges and benefits involved in the process of creating, remixing and repurposing what we are now designating as Reusable Learning Content (RLC). Several key issues are analysed in this report: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, building upon those described in the previous related deliverables 4.1 Content Development Methodologies and 4.2 Quality Control and Web 2.0 technologies. The findings of this current survey, however, provide further recommendations and strategies for using and developing this reusable learning content. In the spirit of ‘reuse’, this work also aims to serve as a foundation for the many different stakeholders and users within, and beyond, the ICOPER community who are interested in reusing learning resources. This report analyses a variety of information. Evidence has been gathered from a qualitative survey that has focused on the technical and pedagogical recommendations suggested by a Special Interest Group (SIG) on the most innovative practices with respect to new media content authors (for content authoring or modification) and course designers (for unit creation). This extended community includes a wider collection of OER specialists. This collected evidence, in the form of video and audio interviews, has also been represented as multimedia assets potentially helpful for learning and useful as learning content in the New Media Space (See section 4 for further details). Section 2 of this report introduces the concept of reusable learning content and reusability. Section 3 discusses an application created by the ICOPER community to enhance the opportunities for developing reusable content. Section 4 of this report provides an overview of the methodology used for the qualitative survey. Section 5 presents a summary of thematic findings. Section 6 highlights a list of recommendations for effective reuse of educational content, which were derived from thematic analysis described in Appendix A. Finally, section 7 summarises the key outcomes of this work

Object lessons : a learning object approach to e-learning for social work education

Learning objects are bite-sized digital learning resources designed to tackle the e-learning adoption problem by virtue of their scale, adaptability, and interoperability. The learning object approach advocates the creation of small e-learning resources rather than whole courses: resources that can be mixed and matched; used in a traditional or online learning environment; and adapted for reuse in other discipline areas and in other countries. Storing learning objects within a subject specific digital repository to enable search, discovery, sharing and use adds considerable value to the model. This paper explores the rationale for a learning object approach to e-learning and reflects on early experiences in developing a national learning object repository for social work education in Scotland

Metadata, repository and methodology in learning objects

Many universities in different countries are redesigning their degree and master programmes on the basis of new academic and professional profiles incorporating a number of competences. One competence can be acquired through several learning objects. A wide variety of learning repositories that provide resources for education in the form of learning objects can be found. These resources are normally stored in learning object repositories where they are catalogued with metadata facilitating retrieval by end users. The aim of this paper is to describe the elements associated to learning objects: metadata, repositories and their related methodologies.This research has been carried out under the project of innovation and educational improvement (PIME/2014/A21) “OAICE: Learning Objects for the Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Competence” funded by the Universitat Politècnica de València and the School of Computer Science.Fernández Diego, M.; Gordo Monzó, ML.; Boza García, A.; Cuenca, L.; Ruiz Font, L.; Alemany Díaz, MDM.; Alarcón Valero, F. (2015). Metadata, repository and methodology in learning objects. En EDULEARN15: 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. Barcelona, Spain. July 6-8, 2015. IATED. 4755-4761. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/56975S4755476

Panning for gold: designing pedagogically-inspired learning nuggets

Tools to support teachers and learning technologists in the creation of effective learning designs are currently in their infancy. This paper describes a metadata model, devised to assist in the conception and design of new learning activities, that has been developed, used and evaluated over a period of three years. The online tool that embodies this model was not originally intended to produce runtime executable code such as IMS-LD, but rather focussed on assisting teachers in the thought processes involved in selecting appropriate methods, tools, student activities and assessments to suit the required learning objectives. Subsequently, we have modified the RELOAD editor such that the output from our tool can be translated into IMS-LD. The contribution of this paper is the comparison of our data model with that of IMS-LD, and the analysis of how each can inform the other

Designing learning object repositories : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Science in Information Sciences at Massey University

Learning object repositories are expanding rapidly into the role of independent educational systems that not only are a supplement to a traditional way of learning, but also allow users to search, exchange and re-use learning objects. The intention of this innovative technology is to have such repositories to collect a database of learning objects catalogued by the learning content management system. However, for users to perform an efficient search, these learning objects would need to use metadata standards or specifications to describe their properties. For learning objects stored within the repositories, metadata standards are often used to descibe them so users of the respositories are able to find the accurate resources they required, hence metadata standards are important elements of any learning object repository. In this paper, a courseware example is used to demonstrate how to define a set of characteristics that we want to describe for our courseware, and attempt to map the data schema in the database with the available metadata standards. The outcome is to identify a set of metadata elements that would fully describe our learning objects stored within the learning object repository, and these metadata elements will also assist instructors to create adaptable courseware that can be reused by different instructors. Metadata standard is known as a critical element for the management of learning objects, not only will it increase the accuracy of the search results, it will also provide more relevant and descriptive information about the learning objects to the searchers

A flexible open source web platform to facilitate Learning Object evaluation

Systematic evaluation of Learning Objects is essential to make high quality Web-based education possible. For this reason, several educational repositories and e-Learning systems have developed their own evaluation models and tools. However, the differences of the context in which Learning Objects are produced and consumed suggest that no single evaluation model is sufficient for all scenarios. Besides, no much effort has been put in developing open tools to facilitate Learning Object evaluation and use the quality information for the benefit of end users. This paper presents LOEP, an open source web platform that aims to facilitate Learning Object evaluation in different scenarios and educational settings by supporting and integrating several evaluation models and quality metrics. The work exposed in this paper shows that LOEP is capable of providing Learning Object evaluation to e-Learning systems in an open, low cost, reliable and effective way. Possible scenarios where LOEP could be used to implement quality control policies and to enhance search engines are also described. Finally, we report the results of a survey conducted among reviewers that used LOEP, showing that they perceived LOEP as a powerful and easy to use tool for evaluating Learning Objects

A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Reuse of Open Learning Resources

Educational standards are having a significant impact on e-Learning. They allow for better exchange of information among different organizations and institutions. They simplify reusing and repurposing learning materials. They give teachers the possibility of personalizing them according to the student’s background and learning speed. Thanks to these standards, off-the-shelf content can be adapted to a particular student cohort’s context and learning needs. The same course content can be presented in different languages. Overall, all the parties involved in the learning-teaching process (students, teachers and institutions) can benefit from these standards and so online education can be improved. To materialize the benefits of standards, learning resources should be structured according to these standards. Unfortunately, there is the problem that a large number of existing e-Learning materials lack the intrinsic logical structure required, and further, when they have the structure, they are not encoded as required. These problems make it virtually impossible to share these materials. This thesis addresses the following research question: How to make the best use of existing open learning resources available on the Internet by taking advantage of educational standards and specifications and thus improving content reusability?In order to answer this question, I combine different technologies, techniques and standards that make the sharing of publicly available learning resources possible in innovative ways. I developed and implemented a three-stage tool to tackle the above problem. By applying information extraction techniques and open e-Learning standards to legacy learning resources the tool has proven to improve content reusability. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of how these technologies can be used in real scenarios and shows how online education can benefit from them. In particular, three main components were created which enable the conversion process from unstructured educational content into a standard compliant form in a systematic and automatic way. An increasing number of repositories with educational resources are available, including Wikiversity and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseware. Wikivesity is an open repository containing over 6,000 learning resources in several disciplines and for all age groups [1]. I used the OpenCourseWare repository to evaluate the effectiveness of my software components and ideas. The results show that it is possible to create standard compliant learning objects from the publicly available web pages, improving their searchability, interoperability and reusability

A framework for the assembly and delivery of multimodal graphics in E-learning environments

In recent years educators and education institutions have embraced E-Learning environments as a method of delivering content to and communicating with their learners. Particular attention needs to be paid to the accessibility of the content that each educator provides. In relation to graphics, content providers are instructed to provide textual alternatives for each graphic using either the “alt” attribute or the “longdesc” attribute of the HTML IMG tag. This is not always suitable for graphical concepts inherent in technical topics due to the spatial nature of the information. As there is currently no suggested alternative to the use of textual descriptions in E-Learning environments, blind learners are at a significant disadvantage when attempting to learn Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematical (STEM) subjects online. A new approach is required that will provide blind learners with the same learning capabilities enjoyed by their sighted peers in relation to graphics. Multimodal graphics combine the modalities of sound and touch in order to deliver graphical concepts to blind learners. Although they have proven successful, they can be time consuming to create and often require expertise in accessible graphic design. This thesis proposes an approach based on mainstream E-Learning techniques that can support non-experts in the assembly of multimodal graphics. The approach is known as the Multimodal Graphic Assembly and Delivery Framework (MGADF). It exploits a component based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide non experts with the ability to assemble multimodal graphics and integrate them into mainstream E-Learning environments. This thesis details the design of the system architecture, information architecture and methodologies of the MGADF. Proof of concept interfaces were implemented, based on the design, that clearly demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. The interfaces were used in an end-user evaluation that assessed the benefits of a component based approach for non-expert multimodal graphic producers