Reuse Of Educational Resources Research Articles

Use of Repositories of Digital Educational Resources: State-of-the-Art Review

Repositories of digital educational resources have reached a significant level of development and diversification in the last decade to the point of becoming a component in higher education transformation. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the studies about the use and adoption of repositories of digital educational resources. Some quantitative approaches mainly collect metrics related to the publishing and reuse of educational resources. However, there is still insufficient empirical evidence to account for the types of adoption and use of educational repositories. There are few studies aimed at determining which are the dimensions of adoption of educational resources repositories by scholars, how the adoption of educational repositories overlaps in teaching practices, and which subjective, contextual, institutional, curricular, and instructional factors are involved in the different types of use.

A Proposal of an E-Learning Inter-Operable Platform Based on Semantic Web

Electronic learning, commonly called e-learning, has the goal of using technology to spread knowledge. Actually, the fast growing of Internet has allowed the creation of a variety of e-learning platforms. Thus there is the need for the regulation and interoperation of these platforms. Interoperability is a key factor in e-learning systems because it allows exchange and reuse of educational resources developed in different platforms. Problems may appear in their design and implementation because of the lack of interoperability among educative platforms contents. For that reason, it is important to use meaningful information to make possible the interoperability among different environments and to help in the management of proper contents. This is the area where Semantic Web may play a key role for reaching this goal. In this work, we propose the design of an e-learning platform prototype, that using semantic meaning, helps in the solution of interoperability problems.

Guest Editorial: Open Educational Resources in Engineering Education: Various Perspectives Opening the Education of Engineers

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge.” Reuse of educational resources by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for the educational environment. This Special Issue editorial introduces six interesting experiences, representative of the use of OER in engineering education in important areas such as the production of open content at various scales, reuse of contents, institutional open Web site initiatives, and technological applications to support the exploitation of OER, all at different degrees of maturity. Since some readers will be unfamiliar with prior work on OER, this Special Issue also outlines the hot topics in OER and the critical factors for success when joining the Open Educational Movement. Finally, the editorial provides a set of recommendations and examples offered by the Special Issue editors from their over 6 years of experience leading a research group in semantic Web technologies applied to Open Education. A key requirement, in their opinion, is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user.

ORIOLE, in the Search for Evidence of OER in Teaching. Experiences in the Use, Re-use and the Sharing and Influence of Repositories

The study presented here aims to gather useful information on the use, re-reuse and sharing of resources in Education and also the influence of repositories, to better understand the perspective of individual practitioners and suggest future areas of debate for researchers.Open Resources: Influence on Learners and Educators (ORIOLE) project, was based within the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University (OU) from 2009-2013 and focused on investigating, understanding and disseminating about use and reuse of open resources in learning and teaching. This paper focuses on the second survey activity of this project. During 2011 (Pegler, 2012), an extensive online survey about reuse of educational resources was conducted through (mainly UK-based) practitioner communities. In 2013, a more international version was created (available in English and Spanish) and circulated during that year (http://bit.ly/OERsurvey_2013).The ORIOLE Survey 2013 collected information about the contexts in which open resource use may occur, looking particularly at attitudes about reuse of educational resources (OER) in teaching. What influences open resources in education is a topic of relevance to anyone taking on forward engagement with open education and the answers lie with those who are working directly in the delivery of learning and teaching, and those who support this work.It is hoped that this qualitative analysis will provide a deeper understanding of the differences in the motivation to engage with OER and the shifts in experience and expectations across diverse contexts.

An Assistant for Loading Learning Object Metadata: An Ontology Based Approach

Introduction Nowadays the web is one of the most important sources of educational material where students and teachers have a large amount of information at their disposal. For this information retrieval process, people use search engines which, unfortunately in many cases, do not return the desired information or return too many web pages. Learning objects are intended to help with the storage, classification, and reuse of educational resources. A Learning Object (LO) is any digital resource that can be reused to support learning Editor: Janice Whatley (Wiley, 2002). LOs can be used by a student who wants to learn a subject or may be used by a teacher who wants to prepare materials for his/her class. LOs are described with metadata usually in the standard IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12) and they are stored in different repositories. Examples of such repositories are FLOR (www.laclo.org), Ariadne (www.ariadne-eu.org) and OER Commons (www.oercommons.org). There other standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, or DCMI (dublincore.org), which is an open organization supporting innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology. The Dublin Core Metadata is not focused on educational metadata but it maintains a number of formal and informal relationships with different standards bodies and it is widely used. Other metadata standards related with educational metadata are: IMS Learning Object Metadata IMS LOM (http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata), Canadian Core Learning Resource Metadata Protocol CanCor (http://www.cancore.ca) and UK Learning Object Metadata Core UK LOM (http://www.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore/uklomcore v0p2 may04.doc). We decided to use IEEE LOM because it is one of the most used in the community of learning objects. Users can retrieve LOs through searches in web repositories. Thus, the importance of high quality metadata is key for a successful retrieval. Recommender systems, based on metadata information and user profiles, arise to help people to retrieve the resources that are most appropriate to user's needs and preferences (Casali, Deco, Bender, & Gerling, 2012). Nevertheless, preparing learning resources with suitable metadata is labor-intensive and, consequently, there is a lack of quality information in these metadata. Michael Sonntag (2004) analyzes the importance of metadata for learning objects, as these resources may be reused often and possibly in different contexts. Some problems that he points are the lack of metadata, the diversity of standards, and the search engine support. Thus, the development of automatic/semi-automatic extraction systems seems to be a very important step towards solving this problem. Up to now, there are not many works on automatic metadata extraction. Each of the existent tools for metadata extraction has its own objectives, architecture and uses different techniques. For instance, some extractors systems can be seen in Alfano, Lenzitti, and Visalli (2007), Li, Dorai, and Farrell (2005), Motz et al. (2009), Pire, Espinase, Casali, and Deco (2011), and Tang (2007). In addition, there exist some metadata editors. For example, the Eureka project (http://eureka.ntic.org) is an initiative that provides a collective catalog of teaching and learning resources gathered by various organizations involved in the production of ITC educational resources. Eureka's shell is based on open source code. The data can be federated with other repositories built on a LOM application profile. Another project is Advanced Learning Object Hub Application ALOHA 1.3 (http://aloha.netera.ca/). The Learning Commons at the University of Calgary has done extensive research and development of tools and techniques to deal with workflow productivity issues related to content repurposing and metadata indexing. ALOHA's flexible interface is friendly for amateur users and customizable for the professional indexer. …

Sharing Resources in Educational Communities

The paper explores the implications of mobility within educational communities for sharing and reuse of educational resources. The study begins by exploring individualsâ?? existing strategies for sharing and reusing educational resources within localised and distributed communities, with particular emphasis on the impact of geographic location on these strategies. The results indicate that the geographic distribution of communities has little impact on individualsâ?? strategies for resource management, since many individuals are communicating via technology tools with colleagues within a localised setting. The study points to few major differences in the ways in which individuals within the localised and distributed communities store, share and collaborate around educational resources. Moving beyond the view of individuals being statically involved in one or two communities, mobility across communities, roles and geographic location are formulated and illustrated through eight scenarios. The effects of mobility across these scenarios are outlined and a framework for future research into mobility and resource sharing within communities discussed.

CULTURAL ISSUES IN THE SHARING AND REUSE OF RESOURCES FOR LEARNING

It has been argued that the reuse of educational resources will contribute to the development of economies of scale in which users, both learners and teachers, can create, source, and share knowledge and information. Central to this objective are Learning Object Repositories (LORs) that can support resource reuse within and across learning communities. The uptake and use of LORs by communities will be influenced by a number of sociocultural factors that are difficult to distinguish and solve, since they involve a number of interrelated, tacit variables. In this article, we discuss three case studies outlining a range of actual and potential cultural issues affecting the implementation of LORs. We present a framework that can support systematic identification of these issues in the design and development stage and guide future implementations.