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

Template-driven teacher modelling approach : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science at Massey University, Palmerston North

This thesis describes the Template-driven Teacher Modeling Approach, the initial implementation of the template server and the formative evaluation on the prototype. The initiative of Template-driven teacher modeling is to integrate the template server and intelligent teacher models in Web-based education systems for course authoring. There are a number of key components in the proposed system: user interface, template server and content repository. The Template-Driven Teacher Modeling (TDTM) architecture supports the course authoring by providing higher degree of control over the generation of presentation. The collection of accumulated templates in the template repository for a teacher or a group of teachers are selected as the inputs for the inference mechanism in teacher's model to calculate the best representation of the teaching strategy, and then predict teacher intention when he or she interacts with the system. Moreover, the presentation templates are kept to support the re-use of the on-line content at the level of individual screens with the help of Template Server

E-learning standards

E-learning standards refer to a system of common rules for content, authoring software and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) - rules that specify how courses can be created and delivered over multiple platforms so that they all operate seamlessly together. Accredited standards ensure that the investment in time and intellectual capital could move from one system to the next. Currently, e-learning standards are being developed by four main organizations: AICC, IEEE, IMS, and ADL. The article presents some aspects of these standards.E-learning, standards.

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

Authors Support in the TM4L Environment

The TM4L environment enables the development and use of ontology-aware courseware based on the Semantic Web technology Topic Maps. In this paper we discuss its features in the light of authoring support, giving illustrative examples to highlight its use

Supporting sustainable e‐learning

This paper draws upon work carried out within phase one of a national forum for support staff, funded by the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre. It sets out themes in current Learning Technology research within the context of institutional practice. It reports the responses of a range of e‐learning support staff to new developments in the reuse and sharing of Learning Objects. The article highlights tensions across support units, inconsistencies in support provision and confusion over issues concerning different modes of teaching. It also forewarns a growing gap between institutional practice and research in the development of approaches to sustainable e‐learning

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