Supporting the Reuse of Open Educational Resources through Open Standards

Glahn, C., Kalz, M., Gruber, M., & Specht, M. (2010). Supporting the Reuse of Open Educational Resources through Open Standards. In T. Hirashima, A. F. Mohd Ayub, L. F. Kwok, S. L. Wong, S. C. Kong, & F. Y. Yu (Eds.), Workshop Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computers in Education: ICCE2010 (pp. 308-315). November, 29 - December, 3, 2010, Putrajaya, Malaysia: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.In this paper we analyse open standards for supporting the reuse of OER in different knowledge domains based on a generic architecture for content federation and higher-order services. Plenty OER are available at different institutions. We face the problem that the mere availability of these resources does not directly lead to their reuse. To increase the accessibility we integrated existing resource repositories to allow educational practitioners to discover appropriate resources. On top of this content federation we build higher order services to allow re-authoring and sharing of resources. Open standards play an important role in this process for developing high-level services for lowering the thresholds for the creation, distribution and reuse of OER in higher education.This paper has been partly sponsored by the GRAPPLE project (www.grapple-project.org) that is funded by the European Union within the Framework Programme 7 and the following European Projects funded in the eContentPlus Programme: MACE (ECP-2005-EDU-038098, portal.mace-orject.org), OpenScout (grant ECP-2008-EDU-428016, cf. www.openscout.net), and Share.TEC (ECP-2007-EDU-427015/Share.TEC, www.share-tec.eu)

Enseñanza abierta como factor de fortalecimiento conceptual y de las concepciones sobre educación virtual, un estudio de caso

The following is the development and results of a qualitative research, a form of case study, around an open teaching process applied to students of the Faculty of Education and Human Sciences of the University of Córdoba. For this purpose, a virtual learning environment on virtual education was designed and implemented, the attributes of “the open” were applied, with the purpose of learning and documenting the scope and limitations of open teaching as a factor of conceptual strengthening and of conceptions about teaching practice. The analysis of the experience of open training is approached from the attributes of the open applied in the light of the proposed categories of analysis: content, interactions and mediations. The results of this implementation are translated into a conceptual practice.A continuación se presenta el desarrollo y resultados de una investigación de naturaleza cualitativa, a manera de estudio de caso, alrededor de un proceso de enseñanza abierta aplicado a los estudiantes de la Facultad de Educación y Ciencias Humanas de la Universidad de Córdoba. Para tal efecto, se diseñó e implementó un ambiente virtual de aprendizaje sobre educación virtual, en el que se aplicaron atributos de “lo abierto”, con el propósito explorar y documentar los alcances y limitaciones de la enseñanza abierta como factor de fortalecimiento conceptual y de las concepciones sobre la práctica docente. El análisis de la experiencia de formación abierta se abordó a partir de los atributos de lo abierto aplicados a la luz de las categorías de análisis propuestas: contendidos, interacciones y mediaciones. Los resultados de dicha implementación mostraron un avance en la apropiación conceptual y de las concepciones sobre la práctica docente en educación virtual. &nbsp

A Placement Web-Service for Lifelong Learners

Kalz, M., Drachsler, H., Van der Vegt, W., Van Bruggen, J., Glahn, C., & Koper, R. (2009). A Placement Web-Service for Lifelong Learners. In K. Tochtermann & H. Maurer (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies (pp. 289-298). September, 2-4, 2009, Graz, Austria: Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz.This contribution introduces a placement web-service which has been developed in the context of the TENCompetence Integrated Project. The web-service uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to calculate similarity between documents in learner portfolios and content in the current learning network of the learner. In the first part of the paper the placement problem in learning networks is introduced. Next we discuss the architecture of the current web-service prototype and describe our evaluation approach. Several limitations and future developments are discussed at the end of the paper.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Infrastrukturen zur Verwaltung von Metadaten für Offene Bildungsressourcen

Kalz, M., Klemke, R., Ternier., S., & Specht, M. (2010). Infrastrukturen zur Verwaltung von Metadaten für Offene Bildungsressourcen. Zeitschrift für E-Learning. 3/2010. Innsbruck: Studienverlag.In den letzten Jahren sind weltweit zahlreiche Initiativen gestartet worden, um offene Bildungsressourcen zu speichern und der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Zu diesem Zweck sind an vielen Orten Lernobjektrepositorien eingerichtet worden, die die persistente Speicherung von offenen Bildungsressourcen erlauben. Die dezentrale Einrichtung dieser Repositorien machte es für Endbenutzer schwierig, geeignete Ressourcen in ihrer Domäne zu finden und wiederzuverwenden. Darüberhinaus waren in vielen Fällen keine oder wenig standardisierte Metadaten mit den Lerninhalten gespeichert, was das Finden von passenden Lernresourcen noch mehr erschwerte. Um die Sichtbarkeit und Zugänglichkeit von Offenen Bildungsressourcen zu erhöhen, hat die Europäische Kommission im Rahmen des eContentplus-Programmes Projekte gefördert, die diese Sitution verbessern sollten. In diesem Beitrag sollen Erfahrungen aus einigen Projekten vorgestellt und diskutiert werden. Dazu werden in diesem Artikel das verteilte Management von offenen Bildungsressourcen erläutert, die Erstellung eines Applikationsprofils diskutiert sowie die Rolle von verschiedenen Metadaten und deren Erstellung vorgestellt. Der Beitrag richtet sich an Projektleiter und Entscheidungsträger von Projekten, die sich mit Lernobjekten beschäftigen sowie an Forscher, die die Zugänglichkeit von Lernobjekten verbessern wollen.This research has been co-funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus targeted project OpenScout, grant ECP 2008 EDU 428016 (cf. http://www.openscout.net), the best practice network iCoper, grant ECP-2007-EDU-417007 (cf. http://www.icoper.org/ and the targeted project Share.Tec, grant ECP-2007-EDU-427015 (cf. http://www.sharetecproject.eu/)

Navigation Support for Learners in Informal Learning Networks

Learners increasingly use the Internet as source to find suitable information for their learning needs. This especially applies to informal learning that takes place during daily activities that are related to work and private life. Unfortunately, the Internet is overwhelming which makes it difficult to get an overview and to select the most suitable information. Navigation support may help to reduce time and costs involved selecting suitable information on the Internet. Promising technologies are recommender systems known from e-commerce systems like Amazon.com. They match customers with a similar taste of products and create a kind ‘neighborhood’ of likeminded customers. They look for related products purchased by the neighbors and recommend these to the current customer. In this thesis we explore the application of recommender systems to offer personalized navigation support to learners in informal Learning Networks. A model of a recommender system for informal Learning Networks is proposed that takes into account pedagogical characteristics and combines them with collaborative filtering algorithms. Which learning activities are most suitable depends on needs, preferences and goals of individual learners. Following this approach we have conducted two empirical studies. The results of these studies showed that the application of recommender systems for navigation support in informal Learning Networks is promising when supporting learners to select most suitable learning activities according to their individual needs, preferences and goals. Based on these results we introduce a technical prototype which allows us to offer navigation support to lifelong learners in informal Learning Networks

A new technique for intelligent web personal recommendation

Personal recommendation systems nowadays are very important in web applications because of the available huge volume of information on the World Wide Web, and the necessity to save users’ time, and provide appropriate desired information, knowledge, items, etc. The most popular recommendation systems are collaborative filtering systems, which suffer from certain problems such as cold-start, privacy, user identification, and scalability. In this thesis, we suggest a new method to solve the cold start problem taking into consideration the privacy issue. The method is shown to perform very well in comparison with alternative methods, while having better properties regarding user privacy. The cold start problem covers the situation when recommendation systems have not sufficient information about a new user’s preferences (the user cold start problem), as well as the case of newly added items to the system (the item cold start problem), in which case the system will not be able to provide recommendations. Some systems use users’ demographical data as a basis for generating recommendations in such cases (e.g. the Triadic Aspect method), but this solves only the user cold start problem and enforces user’s privacy. Some systems use users’ ’stereotypes’ to generate recommendations, but stereotypes often do not reflect the actual preferences of individual users. While some other systems use user’s ’filterbots’ by injecting pseudo users or bots into the system and consider these as existing ones, but this leads to poor accuracy. We propose the active node method, that uses previous and recent users’ browsing targets and browsing patterns to infer preferences and generate recommendations (node recommendations, in which a single suggestion is given, and batch recommendations, in which a set of possible target nodes are shown to the user at once). We compare the active node method with three alternative methods (Triadic Aspect Method, Naïve Filterbots Method, and MediaScout Stereotype Method), and we used a dataset collected from online web news to generate recommendations based on our method and based on the three alternative methods. We calculated the levels of novelty, coverage, and precision in these experiments, and we found that our method achieves higher levels of novelty in batch recommendation while achieving higher levels of coverage and precision in node recommendations comparing to these alternative methods. Further, we develop a variant of the active node method that incorporates semantic structure elements. A further experimental evaluation with real data and users showed that semantic node recommendation with the active node method achieved higher levels of novelty than nonsemantic node recommendation, and semantic-batch recommendation achieved higher levels of coverage and precision than non-semantic batch recommendation