Open educational resources: Conversations in cyberspace – Edited by Susan D'Antoni & Catriona Savage

Klemke, R., Kalz, M., Specht, M., & Ternier, S. (2010). Open educational resources: Conversations in cyberspace – Edited by Susan D'Antoni & Catriona Savage. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6), 968-970. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01135_1_1.x. PrePrint Version. Original available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01135_1_1.x Retrieved October 20, 2010.Open educational resources reports on a series of online forums organised by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) about open educational resources (oer) in 2005 and 2007. Here more than 600 participants from ninety countries report on oer history, achievements, issues and challenges from oer provider and user perspectives. The selection of approaches from developed and developing countries represents a broad range of perspectives and approaches. The book has four sections. Section 1 discusses lessons learned and challenges identified. Section 2 addresses research and development issues. Section 3 discusses motivational aspects and incentives. Section 4 addresses priority issues.ICOPER, Share.TEC, OpenScou

Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects

Klemke, R., Ternier, S., Kalz, M., & Specht, M. (2010). Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6), 873-882. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01127.x PrePrint Version. Original available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01127.x Retrieved October 20, 2010.Making learning objects available is critical to reuse learning resources. Making content transparently available and providing added value to different stakeholders is among the goals of the European Commission's eContentPlus programme. This article analyses standards and protocols relevant for making learning objects accessible in distributed data provider networks. Types of metadata associated with learning objects and methods for metadata generation are discussed. Experiences from European projects highlight problems in implementing infrastructures and mapping metadata types into common application profiles. The use of learning contents and its associated metadata in different scenICOPER, Share.TEC, OpenScou

D2.1 Integrated Roadmap

Deliverable 2.1 – The Integrated Roadmap – summarises the first 18 months of requirements gathering and analysis in the TENCompetence project. The document consists of a summary description and a number of annexes with detailed results. The methodology chosen by the project is the Unified Process, supplemented with scenario-based software development techniques. On the basis of initial scenario’s and specific use cases, six high-level use cases were identified that summarise the future functionality of the TENCompetence integrated system. These high-level use cases build on the domain model that is also included. The four main components of the TENCompetence project, i.e. (a) the high-level use cases, (b) the domain model, (c) the project objectives and (d) the experimental setup of the pilots were then critically analysed in order to identify possible gaps between them. On the basis of this gap analysis, some recommendations were formulated for the next development cycles. On the basis of all the work in the four components and the gap analysis, detailed extended use cases with activity diagrams and a data model were developed and formulated, which again serve as the basis for the first version of the integrated system, the Personal Competence Manager. Finally, the document describes the future of the requirements process in the form of a research roadmap, and a detailed procedure for handling change requests to the integrated system.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

What does this Python code do?: An exploratory analysis of novice students’ code explanations

Motivation. Code reading skills are important for comprehension. Explain-in-plain-English tasks (EiPE) are one type of reading exercises that show promising results on the ability of such exercises to differentiate between particular levels of code comprehension. Code reading/explaining skills also correlate with code writing skills. Objective. This paper aims to provide insight in what novice students express in their explanations after reading a piece of code, and what these insights can tell us about how the students comprehend code. Method. We performed an exploratory analysis on four reading assignments extracted from a university-level beginners course in Python programming. We paid specific attention to 1) the core focus of student answers, 2) elements of the code that are often included or omitted, and 3) errors and misconceptions students may present. Results. We found that students prioritize the output that is generated by print-statements in a program. This is indication that these statements may have the ability to aid students make sense of code. Furthermore, students appear to be selective about which elements they find important in their explanation. Assigning variables and asking input was less often included, whereas control-flow elements, print statements and function definitions were more often included. Finally, students were easily confused or distracted by lines of code that seemed to interfere with the newly learned programming constructs. Also domain knowledge (outside of programming) both positively and negatively interfered with reading and interpreting the code. Discussion. Our results pave the way towards a better understanding of how students understand code by reading and of how an exercise containing self-explanations after reading, as a teaching instrument, may be useful to both teachers and students in programming education.Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

Virtual reality and collaborative learning: a systematic literature review

Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

A Web-based Adaptive and Intelligent Tutor by Expert Systems

Todays, Intelligent and web-based E-learning is one of regarded topics. So researchers are trying to optimize and expand its application in the field of education. The aim of this paper is developing of E-learning software which is customizable, dynamic, intelligent and adaptive with Pedagogy view for learners in intelligent schools. This system is an integration of adaptive web-based E-learning with expert systems as well. Learning process in this system is as follows. First intelligent tutor determines learning style and characteristics of learner by a questionnaire and then makes his model. After that the expert system simulator plans a pre-test and then calculates his score. If the learner gets the required score, the concept will be trained. Finally the learner will be evaluated by a post-test. The proposed system can improves the education efficiency highly as well as de-creases the costs and problems of an expert tutor. As a result, every time and eve-rywhere (ETEW) learning would be provided via web in this system. Moreover the learners can enjoy a cheap remote learning even at home in a virtual simulated physical class. So they can learn thousands courses very simple and fast.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, The Second International Conference on Advances in Computing and Information Technology (ACITY 2012). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.404