Supporting openness of MOOCs contents through of an OER and OCW framework based on Linked Data technologies

Abstract

The arrival of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the growth of open and online education - Open Educational Resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW)- is increasingly the focus to self-learners as the primary target group. The OER movement has tended to define “openness” in terms of access for use and reuse to educational materials, and to address the geographical and financial barriers, between students, teachers and self-learners with distinguished educational institutions. MOOC initiatives emphasize free access and interactive features rather than static content. The dominant message is of the quantity of access rather than the openness of educational resources for use, re-use, adaptation or repurpose. The purpose of this paper is to present the main aspects to considerer building a framework based on semantic web technologies to support the inclusion of open materials in massive online courses and significantly to improve discovery, accessibility, visibility, and to promote reuse of open educational content in massive courses. This framework will provide a set of services that allows the discovery and access of open educational resources that are extracted from open repositories distributed. Our principal OER providers are OCW institutions. In this context, we opted to apply the principles of Linked Data to integrate, interoperate and mashup data from distributed and heterogeneous repositories of open educational materials.