A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources

Ha, K.-H., Niemann, K., Schwertel, U., Holtkamp, P., Pirkkalainen, H., Börner, D. et al (2011). A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources. In E. Garcia-Barriocanal, A. Öztürk, & M. C. Okur (Eds.), Metadata and Semantics Research: 5th International Conference MTSR 2011 (pp. 312-323), Izmir, Turkey, October 12-14, 2011. Springer.Open educational resources (OER) have a high potential to address the growing need for training materials in management education and training. Today, a high number of OER in management are already available in a large number of repositories. However, users face barriers as they have to search repository by repository with different interfaces to retrieve the appropriate learning content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is not generally supported. The European co-funded project OpenScout addresses these barriers by intelligently connecting leading European OER repositories and providing federated, skillbased search and retrieval web services. On top of this content federation the project supports users with easy-to-apply tools that will accelerate the (re-) use of open content

A Multi-Protocol IoT Platform Based on Open-Source Frameworks

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have evolved rapidly during the last decade, and many architecture types have been proposed for distributed and interconnected systems. However, most systems are implemented following fragmented approaches for specific application domains, introducing difficulties in providing unified solutions. However, the unification of solutions is an important feature from an IoT perspective. In this paper, we present an IoT platform that supports multiple application layer communication protocols (Representational State Transfer (REST)/HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and Websockets) and that is composed of open-source frameworks (RabbitMQ, Ponte, OM2M, and RDF4J). We have explored a back-end system that interoperates with the various frameworks and offers a single approach for user-access control on IoT data streams and micro-services. The proposed platform is evaluated using its containerized version, being easily deployable on the vast majority of modern computing infrastructures. Its design promotes service reusability and follows a marketplace architecture, so that the creation of interoperable IoT ecosystems with active contributors is enabled. All the platform’s features are analyzed, and we discuss the results of experiments, with the multiple communication protocols being tested when used interchangeably for transferring data. Developing unified solutions using such a platform is of interest to users and developers as they can test and evaluate local instances or even complex applications composed of their own IoT resources before releasing a production version to the marketplace

Heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial technologies: Quality of service and availability testing

Due to rapid and constant evolution of wireless communication technologies, standards, protocols, applications, and systems, it is hard to rely on personal experience to make their selection, design and deployment. Testing helps to determine actual performance and limitations of technologies. Testing is also important to avoid the financial and reputation losses of the company as well as to ensure uninterrupted flow of the information for essential services such as healthcare, airports, railways, and military services. Testing covers many aspects of a communications network, including interoperability, conformance, performance and availability. The end-to-end quality of service management implies that features such as service scalability between different networks have to be available. However, wireless QoS requirements are very diverse due to its seamless applications, and moreover, , differences in QoS properties between both wired and wireless applications have a con siderable effect on the level of user service quality as well as platform and application dimensions of network interoperability. The aim of this paper is to establish the network performance and availability requirements for the integrated use of satellite communication technology together with terrestrial network technology in a particular, niche application area, namely the seamless delivery of educational services in rural and remote areas. The suggested testing programme aims to identify the performance and availability issues for the operation of heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial network technologies

Skill-based scouting of open management content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content

Idea-Space: A Use Case of Collaborative Course Development in Higher Education

A key component of Open Education movement are Open Educational Resources (OER), which are defined as any digital objects that are commonly shared in online repositories and can be freely accessed, reused and adapted by a community of users for educational purposes using an open license scheme. This broad definition includes a lot of different artefacts, such as digital learning objects, software tools like wikis or authoring systems, electronic textbooks, and lesson plans. Existing research on OER has focused on how to make digital objects available and re-usable for educators and learners. Currently, there are millions of resources for basically all subjects, education level. However, their adoption has been limited, the consumption of them is passive, and there are still many barriers towards the uptake of OER. Amongst those, are the not-invented-here syndrome and the lack of involvement and recognition of users who feel that they do or cannot contribute appropriately. In our research, we focus on tweaking the steps that are accomplished before having the resources complete and shared. In particular, in situations when ideas are initiated, shaped, and shared with like-minded people in order to create new educational outcomes, such as OER

Enhancing the experience of online users of open education

INSPEC Accession Number: 14853364The limited adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) has kicked off the launch of several projects to search for possible solutions. One of these projects is “Open Educational Ideas and Innovations” (OEI2). The goal of this project is to find alternatives for increasing the uptake of OER and facilitating the collaborative development of OER. To enhance the experience of the users of open education, we interviewed twelve educators and researchers from different higher education institutions across Europe focusing on gathering insights about idea sharing experiences. In this paper, we present our key findings based on these interviews and outline some recommendations for our next open educational platform. One of the main principles of our proposal is providing an end-to-end platform that supports educators right from the very beginning to the very end, instead of focusing on the content delivery only. An open education initiative starts with a preliminary idea whose owner shares with the other interested educators who in turn collaborate altogether to sharpen the idea and generate the content so that it becomes suitable for an open educational courseEdukologijos tyrimų institutasSocialinių mokslų fakultetasVytauto Didžiojo universiteta

Design principles for collaboration platforms for open education

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such collaboration platforms to validate our approach. Based on these insights, we developed a collaboration platform for open education. We validated our platform using observation groups and focus groups to identify the key design principles of powerful collaboration platforms for Open Education. Examples are the need for a simple tool, use of a common terminology, and considering Intellectual Property Rights. In this paper, we present our findings from an initial validation of our collaboration platform and give recommendations towards powerful collaboration platforms for open educational contextsEdukologijos tyrimų institutasSocialinių mokslų fakultetasVytauto Didžiojo universiteta