Hybrid human-AI driven open personalized education

Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Furthermore, people's interests in gaining knowledge pertaining to their personal life (e.g., hobbies and life-hacks) are also increasing dramatically in recent decades. In this situation, anticipating and addressing the learning needs are fundamental challenges to twenty-first century education. The need for such technologies has escalated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where online education became a key player in all types of training programs. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open/free educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature about the utilization of (open and free-online) educational resources toward goal-driven personalized informal learning, by developing a novel Human-AI based system, called eDoer. In this thesis, we discuss all the new knowledge that was created in order to complete the system development, which includes 1) prototype development and qualitative user validation, 2) decomposing the preliminary requirements into meaningful components, 3) implementation and validation of each component, and 4) a final requirement analysis followed by combining the implemented components in order develop and validate the planned system (eDoer). All in all, our proposed system 1) derives the skill requirements for a wide range of occupations (as skills and jobs are typical goals in informal learning) through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements, 2) decomposes skills into learning topics, 3) collects a variety of open/free online educational resources that address those topics, 4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance using our developed intelligent prediction models, 5) helps learners to set their learning goals, 6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goals, and 7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by the pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal eDoer recommendations attain higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported as a statistically significant result

Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners

In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of CSEDU 2020 by SciTePres

Quality Prediction of Open Educational Resources A Metadata-based Approach

In the recent decade, online learning environments have accumulated millions of Open Educational Resources (OERs). However, for learners, finding relevant and high quality OERs is a complicated and time-consuming activity. Furthermore, metadata play a key role in offering high quality services such as recommendation and search. Metadata can also be used for automatic OER quality control as, in the light of the continuously increasing number of OERs, manual quality control is getting more and more difficult. In this work, we collected the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis to observe the effect of quality control on metadata quality. Subsequently, we propose an OER metadata scoring model, and build a metadata-based prediction model to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on our data and model, we were able to detect high-quality OERs with the F1 score of 94.6%. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

An AI-based open recommender system for personalized labor market driven education

Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated, not in the last place in engineering education, as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Anticipating and addressing such dynamism is a fundamental challenge to twenty-first century education. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven approach to the development of an open, personalized, and labor market oriented learning recommender system, called eDoer. We discuss the complete system development cycle starting with a systematic user requirements gathering, and followed by system design, implementation, and validation. Our recommender prototype (1) derives the skill requirements for particular occupations through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements(2) decomposes skills into learning topics(3) collects a variety of open online educational resources that address those topics(4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance with three intelligent prediction models(5) helps learners to set their learning goals towards their desired job-related skills(6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goalsand (7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by means of a pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal recommendations provided by eDoer to acquire knowledge of basic statistics, attained higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported

Metadata analysis of open educational resources

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are openly licensed educational materials that are widely used for learning. Nowadays, many online learning repositories provide millions of OERs. Therefore, it is exceedingly difficult for learners to find the most appropriate OER among these resources. Subsequently, the precise OER metadata is critical for providing high-quality services such as search and recommendation. Moreover, metadata facilitates the process of automatic OER quality control as the continuously increasing number of OERs makes manual quality control extremely difficult. This work uses the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis on OER metadata. Accordingly, this work proposes metadata-based scoring and prediction models to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on the results, our analysis demonstrated that OER metadata and OER content qualities are closely related, as we could detect high-quality OERs with an accuracy of 94.6%. Our model was also evaluated on 884 educational videos from Youtube to show its applicability on other educational repositories

OER Recommendations to Support Career Development

This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous and strategic about their own skill development. Subsequently, high-quality, on-line, personalized educational content and services are also essential to serve this high demand for learning content. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have high potential to contribute to the mitigation of these problems, as they are available in a wide range of learning and occupational contexts globally. However, their applicability has been limited, due to low metadata quality and complex quality control. These issues resulted in a lack of personalised OER functions, like recommendation and search. Therefore, we suggest a novel, personalised OER recommendation method to match skill development targets with open learning content. This is done by: 1) using an OER quality prediction model based on metadata, OER properties, and content; 2) supporting learners to set individual skill targets based on actual labour market information, and 3) building a personalized OER recommender to help learners to master their skill targets. Accordingly, we built a prototype focusing on Data Science related jobs, and evaluated this prototype with 23 data scientists in different expertise levels. Pilot participants used our prototype for at least 30 minutes and commented on each of the recommended OERs. As a result, more than 400 recommendations were generated and 80.9% of the recommendations were reported as useful.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of IEEE Frontiers In Education (FIE) 2020 by IEEE Xplor

An OER Recommender System Supporting Accessibility Requirements

Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs

Quality evaluation of open educational resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and open-licensed educational materials widely used for learning. OER quality assessment has become essential to support learners and teachers in finding high-quality OERs, and to enable online learning repositories to improve their OERs. In this work, we establish a set of evaluation metrics that assess OER quality in OER authoring tools. These metrics provide guidance to OER content authors to create high-quality content. The metrics were implemented and evaluated within SlideWiki, a collaborative OpenCourseWare platform that provides educational materials in presentation slides format. To evaluate the relevance of the metrics, a questionnaire is conducted among OER expert users. The evaluation results indicate that the metrics address relevant quality aspects and can be used to determine the overall OER quality

Variations in sturgeon populations in the coastal waters of the Caspian Sea (Guilan province)

The present study was conducted from autumn 2003 to summer 2005 with the objective to estimate distribution and relative abundance in different species of sturgeons as a function of seasons, and regions in the west coast of the Caspian Sea (Guilan province).Gillnets with a different mesh sizes (26, 33, 40, 60, 100, and 150 mm) were set up at different depths(2, 5, and 10 m) for 24 h. Data on variations in catch, catch per unit effort(CPUE) and length and age composition of sturgeon species were analyzed statistically. Data on CPUE in each region and depth and mean estimates of length and age in fish were reported for each season and each year of the study period. CPUE during 2004-2005 was 1.32 fish which was 30.1% lower than CPUE (1.89 fish) recorded in 2003-2004.CPUE for all species except A. nudiventris decreased during 2004-2005 as compared to that in 2003-2004. Acipenser persicus caught during 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 ranged from 15 to 45 cm in length and comprised 91.1 and 97.1% respectively of the total sturgeon catch. These fish belonged to the one year age class. Mean length recorded in sturgeon fish caught in 2004-2005 decreased as compared to that recorded in 2003-2004. Significant differences were recorded in total length of fish caught in 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. Results obtained from the present study reveal that the abundance of fish increased from west to east indicating a direct relationship between the general currents found in the Caspian Sea and the higher density of nutrients in the eastern region

The mediating effect of emotional intelligence on the performance of Imam Khomeini Hospital Staff in Tehran

Background: The quality of services is significant factors in evaluating the performance of organizations. The purpose of this research was to examine how emotional intelligence mediated the performance of Tehran's Imam Khomeini Medical personnel. Methods: A questionnaire was employed in this practical cross-sectional investigation. Its constituent parts were ascertained by a review of relevant literature in the form of the first suggested model and verification by professionals in the fields of management and healthcare. The Ale-Omran Hospital service quality indicators, Salovey & Mayer's emotional intelligence emotions, and questionnaires evaluating customer expectations and perceptions were among the study's instruments. In this regard, 360 questionnaires were sent online using random stratified sampling. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and validity were analyzed. Results: At 0.6, the coefficient of determination, or R2, suggests that the predictor variables account for 60% of the variation in the dependent variable. When it comes to increasing quality-oriented services, "setting strategic goals" has a greater impact than other predictor factors, according to the F2 value of the effect size of the predictor variables. The association between quality-oriented services and quality-oriented structure is therefore verified, with emotional intelligence acting as a mediating factor. Conclusion: Hospital organizational structures must take into consideration the elements that are effective in providing high-quality medical services from the perspective of their patients, given the mediating role that emotional intelligence plays in the relationship between quality-oriented services and quality-oriented structures