Educational Modelling Languages and Service-Oriented Learning Process Engines

Ranking Learning Objects through Integration of Different Quality Indicators

The solutions used to-date for recommending learning objects have proved unsatisfactory. In an attempt to improve the situation, this document highlights the insufficiencies of the existing approaches, and identifies quality indicators that might be used to provide information on which materials to recommend to users. Next, a synthesized quality indicator that can facilitate the ranking of learning objects, according to their overall quality, is proposed. In this way, explicit evaluations carried out by users or experts will be used, along with the usage data; thus, completing the information on which the recommendation is based. Taking a set of learning objects from the Merlot repository, we analyzed the relationships that exist between the different quality indicators to form an overall quality indicator that can be calculated automatically, guaranteeing that all resources will be rated.

Metrics-based evaluation of learning object reusability

This paper aims to help in the selection of reusable educational materials from repositories on the web, developing an indicator of the reusability of learning objects. For this purpose, our research will be carried out in three stages. The first, based on previous studies in this area, will determine those aspects that influence reusability. The second will define a set of metrics that measure those aspects using metadata. The third will propose different methods of aggregation in order to obtain a single resulting value and evaluate the efficiency of the model by analyzing a significant set of learning objects obtained from the eLera and Merlot repositories. The results obtained suggest that the proposed indicator could provide useful information when searching for learning objects in repositories. This reusability measurement could constitute an indicator of quality, which would allow search results to be ordered, with those with the greatest possibility of being reused taking priority. Furthermore, the proposed reusability indicator could be calculated automatically or in an assisted way if metadata elements satisfy the minimum quality requisites identified

An extensible approach to visually editing adaptive learning activities and designs based on services

Learning management systems (LMS) provide an operational environment in which an online course can be created and later executed. Inter-operation between creators and their authoring facilities, and the LMS execution engine are based on defining standards and specifications, such as the IMS Learning Design (LD). Because an LMS better serves as a course player than as a course creator, a large number of approaches and environments for standards-compliant course authoring have been developed. These approaches and environments propose a number of issues that deal with how adaptations are edited and how to define the connection of learning activities with external learning applications and services. These questions have raised concern, mostly because of the excessive commitment of the creators’ methods and tools used with an educational modeling language, as well as the isolation of the language used to describe the course from the host LMS. This work describes an abstract, extendible language used to specify the learning design of a course, which can be transformed into any LD language as required by the execution environment. The language is used from a generative authoring environment that offers the possibility of editing web services as an additional resource to assess learning activities

Engineering the Life-cycle of semantic services-enhanced learning systems

Service-oriented learning environments are the new paradigm for interoperability of learning management systems. They support a wider range of needs by integrating existing and emergent services, leading to an entirely new architectural design for such systems. The engineering life-cycle of resources and services can be enhanced and integrated in current and future virtual learning environments. This work defines a services-enhanced learning architecture and describes two levels of integration carried out to author, deploy and enact learning services from open web-based interaction protocols and semantic web service descriptions

Non-functional Aspects of Information Integration and Research for the Web Science

Web Science is emerging as an interdisciplinary field that views the Web as a relevant source of information
to be analysed for diverse scientific purposes. Semantic and linked data techniques and standards have been used to integrate existing Web information developing e-research efforts. Web applications and sources have to publish enriched information and data models, which are then matched and aligned. Some aspects of this integration are related with the evolutionary tracking, trustiness and plurality of the information available for e-science research. These aspects need to be modeled independently of the information and data sources of the research discipline. Here we provide an integrative ontology that enables to model such non-functional, informational aspects, to integrate information sources from enriched linked data applications. Finally we describe an application case of information research in the e-culture fiel

The Collaborative Development of Didactic Materials

Development Issues on Linked Data Weblog Enrichment

Metadata and Semantic Research, Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2010, Volume 108, 235-246

In this paper, we describe the issues found during the development of LinkedBlog, a Linked Data extension for WordPress blogs. This extension enables to enrich text-based and video information contained in blog entries with RDF triples that are suitable to be stored, managed and exploited by other web-based applications. The issues have to do with the generality, usability, tracking, depth, security, trustiness and performance of the linked data enrichment process. The presented annotation approach aims at maintaining web-based contents independent from the underlying ontological model, by providing a loosely coupled RDFa-based approach in the linked data application. Finally, we detail how the performance of annotations can be improved through a semantic reasoner.

A systems engineering analysis method for the development of reusable computer-supported learning systems

ReST-based web access to learning design services

A Framework for the Conceptualization of Approaches to Create-by-Reuse of Learning Design Solutions Journal of Universal Computer Science. 13 (7): …

Choreography frameworks for business integration: Addressing heterogeneous semantics