E-learning Standards Research Articles

Comparative Analysis for Cloud Based e-learning

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices and utilities. IT projects in any learning organization at a strategic board level and not –as before - just. e Learning systems usually require hardware and software resources. Many educational institutions cannot afford such investments. This paper highlight the contribution of E-Learning standards with the Cloud standards and the impact on using cloud computing for e-learning solutions. An analysis for the prominent issues in current e Learning systems through a comprehensive comparison between e Learning systems before and after moving to Cloud Computing environment, using a generic framework for “Cloud-based e Learning systems.

Implementace standardů v eLearningových systémech

Nowadays, eLearning standards' support within eLearning systems is much discussed problem. In this problem domain especially the reference model SCORM must be considered. This de-facto standard is a package of common standards and specifications used for the standardization of eLearning activities as eLearning content preparation, using e-course, communication etc. Implementation of standards itself is a process with great difficulty and time requests. Interesting and considerable approach to this problem is dividing all the process into several standalone and isolated steps focused on the individual segments of standards. This concept, in the paper described as 4-tier model of eLearning standards’ implementation, principally based upon the SCORM model enables sequential implementation of support for standards of eLearning metadata, eLearning content and also communication and navigation in e-courses. This possibility leads to portability and independence of result e-content. Discuss concept is a framework for standardization within eLearning subsystem of University Information System at Mendel University in Brno.

Managing Open Educational Resources on the Web of Data

In the last few years, the international work on Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS) underlined new needs for open educational resources (OER) management within the context of the Web of Data. First, within MOOCs, all (or at least most) resources must be open and available on the Web through URIs, including the MOOCs themselves. Second the evolution of research and practice in the field of OER repositories, notably the focus in international e-learning standards, is moving recently from OER metadata stored in relational databases towards RDF-based descriptions of resources stored in triple stores. Third, new resource management tools like COMETE provide more intelligent search capabilities within the Web of data, both for designers who are building MOOCs, and also for students who should be equipped with friendly tools to personalize their environment. We will present some COMETE use cases to illustrate these new possibilities and advocate for their integration within MOOC platforms.

E-learning Ongoing Sesion Authentication Security

This paper examines privacy and security issues associated with e-learning. It presents the basic principles behind privacy practices and legislation. It investigates the more popular e-learning standards to determine their provisions and limitations for privacy and security. Concrete solutions for improving the degree of security achievable are shown. A framework for secure e-learning User Ongoing Session Authenticator is introduced. This framework prevents manipulation from the side of the students during learning, thus allowing a reliable control of learning success.

E-learning Privacy and Security Requirements: Review

The security is very crucial in developing an e-learning system. Emerging standards for distance learning and education influence in a major way the development of e-learning systems. e-learning system must be secured against manipulation from the side of the students and also it protects user’s privacy. This paper presents a review of e-learning privacy and security requirements. It investigates the more popular e-learning standards to determine their provisions and limitations for privacy and security. The capabilities of a number of existing privacy enhancing technologies, including methods for network privacy, security management, and trust systems, are reviewed and assessed.

Using e-learning standards in educational video games

The integration of educational video games in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is a challenging task in need of standardization to improve interoperability and to safeguard investment. The generalized use of VLEs has fostered the emergence of rich contents, and different standards exist to improve their interoperability and reusability. This work describes a proposal of how existing e-learning standards can be used to improve the integration of educational games in VLEs, while introducing a set of models that take into account the features of the selected standards. A specific implementation of this approach in the eAdventure game platform is also presented.

Interoperable Intelligent Tutoring Systems as Open Educational Resources

Because of interoperability issues, intelligent tutoring systems are difficult to deploy in current educational platforms without additional work. This limitation is significant because tutoring systems require considerable time and resources for their implementation. In addition, because these tutors have a high educational value, it is desirable that they could be shared, used by many stakeholders, and easily loaded onto different platforms. This paper describes a new approach to implementing open-source and interoperable intelligent tutors through standardization. In contrast to other methods, our technique does not require using nonstandardized peripheral systems or databases, which would restrict the interoperability of learning objects. Thus, our approach has the advantage of yielding tutors that are fully conformant to e-learning standards and that are free of external resource dependencies. According to our method, atomic tutoring systems are grouped to create molecular tree structures that cover course modules. In addition, given the interoperability of our technique, tutors can also be combined to create courses that have distinct granularities, topics, and target students. The key to our method is the focus on assuring what defines a tutor in terms of behavior and functionalities (inner loops and outer loops). Our proof of concept was developed using SCORM standards. This paper presents the implementation details of our technique, including the theoretical concepts, technical specifications, and practical examples.

A sharable platform for e-learning based on cloud computing architecture

Over the internet, e-learning has speeded up the knowledge transfer without restrictions on time and space in recent years. In order to achieve the goal of knowledge sharing and reusing interactively, lots of available e-learning standards have been adapted to complete the purpose. Normally, learning objects meeting these standards are sharable with other e-learning platforms. Most e-learning platforms, however, are unable to share learning objects directly on the internet. The characteristics of cloud computing provide a promising infrastructure to compute and store resources as services. Hence, this paper introduces cloud computing into an e-learning platform to allow the integration of different e-learning standards to enhance interoperability of learning objects. Besides, an automated standard transformation algorithm is described and implemented on a cloud environment. The proposed approach reveals an expected result that reduces, at least, 2,500 ms for the access of learning content with heterogeneous packaging formats. Therefore, by combining the characteristics of e-learning and approach of cloud computing, educators have not to re-construct learning objects to satisfy e-learning environments developed from different e-learning standards.

Blackboard architecture to integrate components and agents in heterogeneous distributed eLearning systems: An application for learning to program

To build complete and complex eLearning systems, eLearning engineers are used to applying standards that facilitate sharing information as well as distributed service-oriented architectures that provide reuse and interoperability by means of component integration. These concepts lead us to a Component-based Development Process that will allow us to implement tools that give full support to the teaching/learning process, taking advantage of the synergy effect created by the integration of the different components. Thus, throughout this article we analyse the proposals from the most relevant consortia concerned with eLearning standards, showing their service oriented approaches and the middleware technologies which can be used to implement them. This analysis will demonstrate that the use of middleware technologies that use the definition of services’ interface can limit the reuse and interoperability requisites desired by the main standards consortia. Then, we will show a proposal which tries to solve this shortfall, using a blackboard-based architecture for integrating and communicating heterogeneous distributed components, as well as a user environment that also allows us to perform component integration. As an example, we will demonstrate how we have built an application for learning to program by applying our approach and following a Component-based Development Process to implement different components (services, agents, clients, etc.) that integrate it. Hence, we will argue that using blackboard architecture and a Component-based Development Process helps us to solve the identified shortcomings.

Hybrid Model for e-Learning Quality Evaluation

E-learning is becoming increasingly important for the competitive advantage of economic organizations and higher education institutions. Therefore, it is becoming a significant aspect of quality which has to be integrated into the management system of every organization or institution. The paper examines e-learning quality characteristics, standards, criteria and indicators and presents a multi-criteria hybrid model for e-learning quality evaluation based on the method of Analytic Hierarchy Process, trend analysis, and data comparison.

Adding TQ-BOT into a Third-party Learning Management System

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are computer programs that aim at providing personalized instruction to students. In recent years, artificial intelligence conversational robots, usually known as chatterbots, have become very popular in the Internet. In this paper we show how chatterbots can be integrated in e-Learning Systems. To perform such an integration the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm is adopted and e-learning standardization initiatives are considered. A middleware is provided to enable the integration and reuse of chatterbots by e-Learning systems enabling a tight control of their operation. Such middleware takes to account several issues such as authorising users, creating instances, transferring data to and from the chatterbot, assigning permissions to users, and subscribing to events. Our approach is applied to the specific case of TQ-Bot, which is use to track and supervise the student progress and to provide answers orienting the student to the more appropriate course contents.

Informatics in Radiology: Envisioning the Future of E-Learning in Radiology: An Introduction to SCORM

Computer-based learning, or "e-learning," plays an increasingly important role in healthcare education. Modular, standardized approaches to e-learning make learning content portable, reusable, and interoperable. The Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a standard for educational content that builds upon existing standards for e-learning. The "SCORM for Healthcare" model, which is designed to meet the particular needs of learning in health professions, is being developed to improve communication of educational needs, goals, and competencies among healthcare workers, educational providers, and certifying organizations. Radiologists can benefit from SCORM by becoming familiar with its features and the opportunities it affords to improve online learning.

A social web platform based on semantics to share exam questions: the SOLE approach

Internet has changed dramatically leaning and teaching scenarios. As a consequence of this, learning resources are being produced, catalogued and stored using innovative ways, using social and Semantic Web, among others. SOLE provides a platform in which exam questions can be produced supported by Web 2.0 tools, catalogued and labelled via Semantic Web and stored and distributed using e-learning standards. This paper presents, SOLE, a social network of exam questions sharing particularised for software engineering domain, based on semantics and built using Semantic Web and e-learning standards, such as IMS question and test interoperability specification 2.1.

A multi-strategy knowledge interoperability framework for heterogeneous learning objects

This paper presents a knowledge exchange framework that can leverage the interoperability among semantically heterogeneous learning objects. With the release of various e-Learning standards, learning contents and digital courses are easy to achieve cross-platform sharing, exchanging, and even reorganizing. However, knowledge sharing in semantic level is still a challenge due to that the learning materials can be presented in any form, such as audios, videos, web pages, and even flash files. The proposed knowledge exchange framework allows users to share their learning materials (also called “learning objects”) in semantic level automatically. This framework contains two methodologies: the first is a semantic mapping between knowledge bases (i.e. ontologies) which have essentially similar concepts, and the second is an ontology-based classification algorithm for sharable learning objects. The proposed algorithm adopts the IMS DRI standard and classifies the sharable learning objects from heterogeneous repositories into a local knowledge base by their inner meaning instead of keyword matching. Significance of this research lies in the semantic inferring rules for ontology mapping and learning objects classification as well as the full automatic processing and self-optimizing capability. Focused on digital learning materials and contrasted to other traditional technologies, the proposed approach has experimentally demonstrated significantly improvement in performance.

Knowledge Representation of LMS using Ontology

is the next step in the evolution of eLearning systems. Students can have several cognitive styles, which make the efficiency and efficacy of an eLearning system different with distinct students. The three different viewpoints (21) and evolution in the area of e-Learning are pedagogy (learner- oriented educational theories), pragmatic (practical solutions to use of instructional components by teachers and instructional designers), and technological (building instructional components by computer professional). Though there are no distinct classifications of the approaches while implementing, the union of all the viewpoints is not dealt / applied completely by any of the author. This paper focus on integrating the above said principles on semantic educational servers with the power of eLearning standards. The knowledge items (learning objects) are linked to commonly agreed ontology (4), (7), (8). This enables construction of a user-specific course, by semantic querying for topics of interest.

SCORM 기반의 학습자 수준별 콘텐츠 구성 시스템

많은 이러닝 시스템들은 맞춤형 서비스를 위해 SCORM(Sharable Content Object Reference Model)을 표준으로 채택하고 있다. 이러닝 시스템들은 학습자의 학습 효율을 높이기 위해서 학습 난이도를 평가하여 적용하고 있다. 그러나 SCORM은 런-타임 시 학습자의 수준 변화에 따른 맞춤형 콘텐츠 제공이 어렵고, 선택적 학습을 제어하기 어렵다는 단점 때문에 학습도중에 난이도를 변경하면서 학습 콘텐츠를 제공하기 어렵다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 SCORM의 단점을 보완하기 위하여, 학습 도중 학습자의 수준 변화에 따른 학습자의 수준을 재평가하여, 변화된 수준에 적합한 학습 콘텐츠를 제공하는 수준별 콘텐트 구성 시스템(SCOS)을 설계 및 구현하였다. 본 논문에서 구현한 시스템 단원 학습 도중 퀴즈가 제시되는 시점을 불규칙적으로 지정함으로써 학습자의 학습 몰입도를 높이고자 하였으며. 향후에는 보다 정밀한 수준 평가를 기반으로 학습자에게 최적화된 피드백을 제공할 수 있도록 보완할 계획이다. Many e-learning systems adopts SCORM as an e-learning standard. E-learning systems evaluate and apply the learning difficulty in order to improve the studying efficiency. But, it is hard to change the learning difficulty and provide the customized learning contents during studying in SCORM. Because it is difficult to provide the customized contents to learners by changing the learners' level at runtime and to control optional learning. In this paper, we designed and implemented SCORM-based Contents Organization System on learners' level(SCOS) for complementing the SCORM's weakness. SCOS re-evaluates a learner's level whenever the learner's level is changed during learning, and provides customized contents on the learner's level.

Service-Oriented Authoring System to Achieve Interoperability among E-Learning Environment

E-learning environment involves lots of relevant systems, such as the LMS (Learning Management System), the LCMS (Learning Content Management System), the Courseware Authoring System, and so on. Among them, the courseware authoring could be considered as the fundamental process while realizing an e-learning environment. As the result, to provide a friendly user interface in an authoring system has become the most essential part in the e-learning environment. On the other hand, how to simplify the authoring process for those users who aren’t the experts in this domain should be solved as well to make e-learning more popular. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to develop a service-oriented online authoring system based on SCORM standard. The functionalities in our authoring system can be also taken as separate services. These services can be reused in other external systems. In addition, we proposed a transformation mechanism to achieve the interoperability between various e-learning standards. Furthermore, we utilize the IMS LIP specification to maintain the authoring history of individual author, and use these profiles for authors to achieve the personalization authoring process.

Foreword of Special Issue on “Information Education and Technological Application”

Foreword of Special Issue on “Information Education and Technological Application”

Trend of E-Learning

With the improvement of internet technologies and multimedia resources, traditional learning has been replaced by distance learning, web-based learning or others’ e-learning learning styles. According to distance learning, there are many research organizations and companies who make efforts in developing the relevant systems. But they lack interoperability. The only way to reuse these applications is to redevelop them for specific purposes. In order to solve this situation and norm the various learning resources, IMS proposes a new e-learning standard named “Common Cartridge”. This standard not only integrates the past e-learning standards like LOM, SCORM and QTI but also proposes a technical architecture called Learning Tools Interoperability to allow applications to reuse different systems without reprogramming. In this paper, we firstly introduce the current e-learning environment. Then we pay attention on the usage of Common Cartridge standards and discuss the architecture of Learning Tools Interoperability. According to these standards, we will point out the e-learning standard that might be widely utilized in the future.

Promoting computer assisted learning for persons with disabilities

This paper highlights the necessity to respect international accessibility and e-learning standards in creating Web sites or assistive software and provides solutions for access to learning objects, through web services using voice synthesis and speech recognition in Romanian. Inclusive education aims are facilitating the access to information, learning and the reduction of the possible risk of social exclusion. This article also aims to find the most appropriate way to combine the promotion and the awareness of both the general public and of those directly involved, of the importance and usefulness of such solutions in Romania.