Integrating OER in the design of educational material

Blended Learning and Linked-Open-Educational-Resources-Data Approach

IEEE EDUCON2016 will be held in the city of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.Dusit Thani hotel from 11-13 April, 2016, http://www.educon-conference.org/educon2016/

Theme: "Smart Education in Smart Cities"GRUPO UPM GICAC

this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/

Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López Universidad Técnica particular de Loja, Ecuador

Departamento de Ciencias de la ComputaciónLoja, Ecuador

nopiedra@utpl.edu.ec, {jachicaiza, jalopez2}@utpl.edu.ec

Edmundo Tovar CaroUniversidad Politécnica de Madrid

Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos e Ingeniería Softwareedmundo.tovar@upm.es

EDUCON2016 10-13 April 2016, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Purpose

• The purpose of this work is to show a way to enhance the face-to-face classrooms with integration of OERs, and thus create blended learning instruction. The approach is based on Linked Data for describe and publish OER.

• In this new paradigm for educational content consumption and integration, Linked Open Data for OER is expected to play a decisive and productive role for blended learning. The approach presented can be used to support different blended-learning models.

OER materials abstain from traditional copyright in lieu of licenses that allow others to retain, reuse, revise, remix, adapt, and redistribute the digital resources.

Unlike traditionally copyrighted material, these resources are available for "open" use, which means users (teachers, students and self-learners) can edit, modify, customize, and share them.

OERThe availability of open licensing and the ability to reuse and remix content is central to concept of open educational resources.

THE CONTEXT: OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES– Education for all

• Education is an essential tool for individuals and society to solve the challenges of the present and seize the opportunities of the future. However, the current provision of education is limited by educational institutions’ capacity, consequently, this resource is available to the few, not the many.

• The digital revolution offers a potential solution to these limitations, giving a global audience unprecedented access to free, open and high-quality educational resources.

THE CONTEXT: OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES– Free/Open Use, Re-Use, Distribution

• People want to learn. By providing free and open access to education and knowledge, people can fulfill this desire. Students can get additional information, viewpoints and materials to help them succeed.

• Workers can learn something that will help them on the job. • Faculty can exchange material and draw on resources from all around the

world. Researchers can share data and develop new networks. Teachers can find new ways to help students learn. People can connect with others they wouldn’t otherwise meet to share information and ideas.

• Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly shared again, increasing access and allowing new approaches.

• Anyone can access educational materials, scholarly articles, and supportive learning communities anytime they want to.

From OER movement, education is available, accessible, modifiable and free.

• The blended learning model has been recognized by giving students time to reflect, to empower every learner to participate and be “visible”, to enable the instructor to provide oversight and feedback “anywhere, anytime”.

• This is not a mere “bolting together of disparate technologies with any clear vision of the result. ”

• In the context of this work, blending learning can be adopted to increase student participation, engagement, and interactivity, increase connectivity with faculty and other students, increase student engagement and active participation

Blended learning Blended learning is the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face-to-face and online approaches and technologies.

ISSUES OF OPENNESS

• The first level consequences of an OER directly based on the characteristics of a piece of open knowledge, are to provide people the freedom to use, reuse and redistribute.

Openness Challenges• Therefore, a challenge for the community is promoting OER

initiatives with channels that facilitate the discovery, use and reuse for teachers, students and self-learners incorporate them in the educative practice.

• From a technical point of view, the openness of OERs covers issues such as interoperability and discovery. In previous work we have presented how these features can be enhanced by applying Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data.

• Along the same line, the contribution of this paper is to bring OERs to users who need them, specifically, support the MOOCs openness by reusing OERs.

Use of Linked Data on OER Domain

• The goal of Linked Data is to enable human beings to easily share structured data via the Web just as they share documents now.

• The philosophy of Linked Data is that the value and usefulness of data increase in proportion to their links with other data.

• On this ground, Linked Data uses the Web to create different types of links among data from different sources.

Linked Data technologies

• Linked Data technologies can also help to integrate the work of disperse institutions producing diverse linked data. L

• inked Open Data (LOD) is well known for providing a extensive amount of detailed and structured information.

• Linked Data vision enables a new generation of open educational resources that can be semantically described and connected with other data and discoverable sources.

CHALLENGES TO ADOPTING OER• The barriers that faculty cite impacting the adoption of OER

are related to the ease of finding, selecting the appropriate resource and evaluation of OER.

• Difficults reported are: No comprehensive catalog; Too hard to find what I need; Not enough resources for my subject; Not knowing if I have permission to use or change; Not relevant to my local context; Not high-quality; Not used by other faculty I know; Lack of support from my institution; Too difficult to integrate into technology I use; Not effective at improving student performance; Too difficult to change or edit; Too difficult to use; Not current, up-to-date.

the goal is enhance the discoverability, reuse and integration of OER into classroom instruction. From a general perspective, the framework is the synergy between Linked OER Data and human expertise.

Proposed

framework

Synergy Human Expert and Linked OER Data System

The proposed framework combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with emergent technology to create a vast

ecosystem of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational

approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.

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The framework seeks to scale educational opportunities by taking advantage of the power of the Internet, allowing rapid and essentially free dissemination, and enabling people around the world to access knowledge, adapt it to your needs, connect and collaborate.

In addition, the framework encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide. While financial reasons might be particularly persuasive to students and other educational stakeholders, the core purpose of education is to support and improvement learning.

The education is seen as an essential, shared, re-used, adapted, and collaborative social good. OER movement envisions a world where everyone, everywhere, anytime has access to the high quality education and training they desire

CONCLUSIONS• The OER should be designed to be easily adaptable for other users to

other purposes. It should have metadata sufficient for discoverability. OER reusability means that the content is relevant to the specific needs of a user, which is technologically accessible and that it is sufficiently open for use, re-use, re-mix, adapt and re-distribute.

• The philosophy of Linked Data is that the value and usefulness of data increase in proportion to their links with other data. On this ground, Linked Data use the Web to create different types of links among data from different siloed data-sources. In line with this vision of the Web, data and their relations come to play key roles. The availability of data sources based on Linked Data principles help to generate new opportunities to exploit AI techniques focused on machine learning, knowledge representation, information extraction, information integration and multi-agent environments.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS

• One of the primary benefits of an OER is that it can be discovered and adapted to the needs of specific situations. The main contribution of this approach to OER movement is that the Web of linked data constitutes an evolution of the current OER ecosystem towards a global information space where browsing is driven by structured and linked data rather than by HTML-documents as is now the case. Consequently, we argue that these advances are a possible means of supporting interoperability, accessibility and reusability of OER silos.

• Course designs are a collection of OER aggregated in a manner that resembles a traditional courseware take many shapes and forms. When teachers set up blending courses, it takes a great deal of pre-class organization. The material that they teach in a traditional classroom setting must be transformed to fit the hybrid medium. Teachers need to generate creative ways and uses good practices to teach, re-use OER and converter the material from one medium to another so that messages and meaning are not lost. This increases preparation time for teachers. Furthermore, Teachers may be untrained and unfamiliar with the tools and technology available. Typically, free digital versions of the learning paths can be made available to other users as new OER. As future work, the authors are developing an interface for creating learning paths that can be accessed from: http://serendipity.utpl.edu.ec/learningpaths

Thanks!

IEEE EDUCON2016 will be held in the city of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.Dusit Thani hotel from 11-13 April, 2016, http://www.educon-conference.org/educon2016/

Theme: "Smart Education in Smart Cities"GRUPO UPM GICAC

this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/

Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López Universidad Técnica particular de Loja, Ecuador

Departamento de Ciencias de la ComputaciónLoja, Ecuador

nopiedra@utpl.edu.ec, {jachicaiza, jalopez2}@utpl.edu.ec

Edmundo Tovar CaroUniversidad Politécnica de Madrid

Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos e Ingeniería Softwareedmundo.tovar@upm.es

EDUCON2016 10-13 April 2016, Abu Dhabi, UAE