From institutional repositories to personal collections of learning resources

Institutional digital repositories are a basic piece to provide preservation and reutilization of learning resources. However, their creation and maintenance is usually performed following a top-down approach, causing limitations in the search and reutilization of learning resources. In order to avoid this problem we propose to use web 2.0 functionalities. In this paper we present how tagging can be used to enhance the search and reusability functionalities of institutional learning repositories as well as promoting their usage. The paper also describes the evaluation process that was performed in a pilot experience involving open educational resources.

Accessibility in the Design of Learning Resources

These slides accompany a seminar delivered on 20 May 2016 by Jane Warren (Southampton Education School) and Adam Warren (Institute for Learning Innovation and Development). A recording of the lecture can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/zp8u3lq

Issues in design, creation and production of distance-learning resources. 'Cuestiones en el diseño, creación y producción de recursos para la enseñanza a distancia'.

Resumen basado en el de la publicación

Enhancing web-based learning resources with quizzes through an Authoring Tool and an Audience Response System

Quizzes are among the most widely used resources in web-based education due to their many benefits. However, educators need suitable authoring tools that can be used to create reusable quizzes and to enhance existing materials with them. On the other hand, if teachers use Audience Response Systems (ARSs) they can get instant feedback from their students and thereby enhance their instruction. This paper presents an online authoring tool for creating reusable quizzes and enhancing existing learning resources with them, and a web-based ARS that enables teachers to launch the created quizzes and get instant feedback from the class. Both the authoring tool and the ARS were evaluated. The evaluation of the authoring tool showed that educators can effectively enhance existing learning resources in an easy way by creating and adding quizzes using that tool. Besides, the different factors that assure the reusability of the created quizzes are also exposed. Finally, the evaluation of the developed ARS showed an excellent acceptance of the system by teachers and students, and also it indicated that teachers found the system easy to set up and use in their classrooms.

Proposal for the creation of a Center for Learning Resources (CRA) in the School of San Lorenzo de Tarrazu

Education is the basis for economic and social development, but there are great inequalities in education and access to documentary resources, audiovisual and technology, a situation that affects school performance. The Organization of the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) found a correlation between levels of inequality in a country and performance: the greater the inequality, the worse the performance. Investment in education affects human development and benefit is obtained for the individual and society, which is necessary to ensure social equity, so that there is quality education for all. One of the fundamental purposes of the educational process is to train Costa Rican human thinking, analytical and critical of their environment. The purpose of that is acquired through various methods of academic achievement, learning, participation and constant communication of knowledge between the administrative staff, faculty and students. It is appropriate for schools and colleges have a school library or Resource Center for Learning, it is the gathering, analysis and work of the educational community, working with the intellectual growth of students, faculty, staff and community through access to different services and learning resources provided by the library or CRA.

Guidelines for Creating ICT-based Adaptable Learning Resources

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2014

Semantic organization to enhance active learning based on distributed multimedia educational resources

In order to organize distributed educational resources efficiently, to provide active learners an integrated, extendible and cohesive interface to share the dynamically growing multimedia learning materials on the Internet, this paper proposes a generic resource organization model with semantic structures to improve expressiveness, scalability and cohesiveness. We developed an active learning system with semantic support for learners to access and navigate through efficient and flexible manner. We learning resources in an efficient and flexible manner. We provide facilities for instructors to manipulate the structured educational resources via a convenient visual interface. We also developed a resource discovering and gathering engine based on complex semantic associations for several specific topics.

Rich media content adaptation in e-learning systems

The wide use of e-technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of the population, especially with the aim of reintegrating excluded individuals back into society through education. This is particularly true for people with different types of disabilities who may have difficulties while attending traditional on-site learning programs that are typically based on printed learning resources. The creation and provision of accessible e-learning contents may therefore become a key factor in enabling people with different access needs to enjoy quality learning experiences and services. Another e-learning challenge is represented by m-learning (which stands for mobile learning), which is emerging as a consequence of mobile terminals diffusion and provides the opportunity to browse didactical materials everywhere, outside places that are traditionally devoted to education. Both such situations share the need to access materials in limited conditions and collide with the growing use of rich media in didactical contents, which are designed to be enjoyed without any restriction. Nowadays, Web-based teaching makes great use of multimedia technologies, ranging from Flash animations to prerecorded video-lectures. Rich media in e-learning can offer significant potential in enhancing the learning environment, through helping to increase access to education, enhance the learning experience and support multiple learning styles. Moreover, they can often be used to improve the structure of Web-based courses. These highly variegated and structured contents may significantly improve the quality and the effectiveness of educational activities for learners. For example, rich media contents allow us to describe complex concepts and process flows. Audio and video elements may be utilized to add a “human touch” to distance-learning courses. Finally, real lectures may be recorded and distributed to integrate or enrich on line materials. A confirmation of the advantages of these approaches can be seen in the exponential growth of video-lecture availability on the net, due to the ease of recording and delivering activities which take place in a traditional classroom. Furthermore, the wide use of assistive technologies for learners with disabilities injects new life into e-learning systems. E-learning allows distance and flexible educational activities, thus helping disabled learners to access resources which would otherwise present significant barriers for them. For instance, students with visual impairments have difficulties in reading traditional visual materials, deaf learners have trouble in following traditional (spoken) lectures, people with motion disabilities have problems in attending on-site programs. As already mentioned, the use of wireless technologies and pervasive computing may really enhance the educational learner experience by offering mobile e-learning services that can be accessed by handheld devices. This new paradigm of educational content distribution maximizes the benefits for learners since it enables users to overcome constraints imposed by the surrounding environment. While certainly helpful for users without disabilities, we believe that the use of newmobile technologies may also become a fundamental tool for impaired learners, since it frees them from sitting in front of a PC. In this way, educational activities can be enjoyed by all the users, without hindrance, thus increasing the social inclusion of non-typical learners. While the provision of fully accessible and portable video-lectures may be extremely useful for students, it is widely recognized that structuring and managing rich media contents for mobile learning services are complex and expensive tasks. Indeed, major difficulties originate from the basic need to provide a textual equivalent for each media resource composing a rich media Learning Object (LO). Moreover, tests need to be carried out to establish whether a given LO is fully accessible to all kinds of learners. Unfortunately, both these tasks are truly time-consuming processes, depending on the type of contents the teacher is writing and on the authoring tool he/she is using. Due to these difficulties, online LOs are often distributed as partially accessible or totally inaccessible content. Bearing this in mind, this thesis aims to discuss the key issues of a system we have developed to deliver accessible, customized or nomadic learning experiences to learners with different access needs and skills. To reduce the risk of excluding users with particular access capabilities, our system exploits Learning Objects (LOs) which are dynamically adapted and transcoded based on the specific needs of non-typical users and on the barriers that they can encounter in the environment. The basic idea is to dynamically adapt contents, by selecting them from a set of media resources packaged in SCORM-compliant LOs and stored in a self-adapting format. The system schedules and orchestrates a set of transcoding processes based on specific learner needs, so as to produce a customized LO that can be fully enjoyed by any (impaired or mobile) student.

Streaming Video: Student Performance and Relative Use in the Preclinical Curriculum

Purpose: To assess the relationship between student utilization of learning resources, including streaming video (SV), and their performance in the pre-clinical curriculum. [See PDF for complete abstract]

E-Learning Used in a Training Course on Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) for Brazilian Dentists

The purpose of this study was to assess the benefits of using e-learning resources in a dental training course on Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART). This e-course was given in a DVD format, which presented the ART technique and philosophy. The participants were twenty-four dentists from the Brazilian public health system. Prior to receiving the DVD, the dentists answered a questionnaire regarding their personal data, previous knowledge about ART, and general interest in training courses. The dentists also participated in an assessment process consisting of a test applied before and after the course. A single researcher corrected the tests, and intraexaminer reproducibility was calculated (kappa=0.89). Paired t-tests were carried out to compare the means between the assessments, showing a significant improvement in the performance of the subjects on the test taken after the course (p<0.05). A linear regression model was used with the difference between the means as the outcome. A greater improvement on the test results was observed among female dentists (p=0.034), dentists working for a shorter period of time in the public health system (p=0.042), and dentists who used the ART technique only for urgent and/or temporary treatment (p=0.010). In conclusion, e-learning has the potential of improving the knowledge that dentists working in the public health system have about ART, especially those with less clinical experience and less knowledge about the subject.

Sistema de recomendação para plataformas de e-learning

O aumento do número de recursos digitais disponíveis dificulta a tarefa de pesquisa dos recursos mais relevantes, no sentido de se obter o que é mais relevante. Assim sendo, um novo tipo de ferramentas, capaz de recomendar os recursos mais apropriados às necessidades do utilizador, torna-se cada vez mais necessário. O objetivo deste trabalho de I&D é o de implementar um módulo de recomendação inteligente para plataformas de e-learning. As recomendações baseiam-se, por um lado, no perfil do utilizador durante o processo de formação e, por outro lado, nos pedidos efetuados pelo utilizador, através de pesquisas [Tavares, Faria e Martins, 2012]. O e-learning 3.0 é um projeto QREN desenvolvido por um conjunto de organizações e tem com objetivo principal implementar uma plataforma de e-learning. Este trabalho encontra-se inserido no projeto e-learning 3.0 e consiste no desenvolvimento de um módulo de recomendação inteligente (MRI). O MRI utiliza diferentes técnicas de recomendação já aplicadas noutros sistemas de recomendação. Estas técnicas são utilizadas para criar um sistema de recomendação híbrido direcionado para a plataforma de e-learning. Para representar a informação relevante, sobre cada utilizador, foi construído um modelo de utilizador. Toda a informação necessária para efetuar a recomendação será representada no modelo do utilizador, sendo este modelo atualizado sempre que necessário. Os dados existentes no modelo de utilizador serão utilizados para personalizar as recomendações produzidas. As recomendações estão divididas em dois tipos, a formal e a não formal. Na recomendação formal o objetivo é fazer sugestões relacionadas a um curso específico. Na recomendação não-formal, o objetivo é fazer sugestões mais abrangentes onde as recomendações não estão associadas a nenhum curso. O sistema proposto é capaz de sugerir recursos de aprendizagem, com base no perfil do utilizador, através da combinação de técnicas de similaridade de palavras, um algoritmo de clustering e técnicas de filtragem [Tavares, Faria e Martins, 2012].

Sequencing educational resources with Seqins

Existing adaptive educational hypermedia systems have been using learning resources sequencing approaches in order to enrich the learning experience. In this context, educational resources, either expository or evaluative, play a central role. However, there is a lack of tools that support sequencing essentially due to the fact that existing specifications are complex. This paper presents Seqins as a sequencing tool of digital educational resources. Seqins includes a simple and flexible sequencing model that will foster heterogeneous students to learn at different rhythms. The tool communicates through the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification with a plethora of e-learning systems such as learning management systems, repositories, authoring and automatic evaluation systems. In order to validate Seqins we integrate it in an e-learning Ensemble framework instance for the computer programming learning domain.

Interoperability issues between learning object repositories and metadata harvesters

In this paper we describe an open learning object repository on Statistics based on DSpace which contains true learning objects, that is, exercises, equations, data sets, etc. This repository is part of a large project intended to promote the use of learning object repositories as part of the learning process in virtual learning environments. This involves the creation of a new user interface that provides users with additional services such as resource rating, commenting and so. Both aspects make traditional metadata schemes such as Dublin Core to be inadequate, as there are resources with no title or author, for instance, as those fields are not used by learners to browse and search for learning resources in the repository. Therefore, exporting OAI-PMH compliant records using OAI-DC is not possible, thus limiting the visibility of the learning objects in the repository outside the institution. We propose an architecture based on ontologies and the use of extended metadata records for both storing and refactoring such descriptions.