Supporting openness of MOOCs contents through of an OER and OCW framework

based on Linked Data technologies Edmundo Tovar (UPM)

Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López (UTPL)

EDUCON2014 – IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference

3-5 April 2014, Military Museum and Cultural Center, Harbiye, Istanbul, Turkey

Theme: "Engineering Education towards Openness and Sustainability”

UPM GICAC GROUP

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

I. THE EMERGENCE OF MOOCs

The recent emergence of Open Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has helped to spread the Open concept but not to clarify the true meaning of Open.

MOOCs are large-scale online courses where thousands of participants may assist.

Although MOOCs are free as in gratis, they are not open in the sense of being reusable of openly accessible. Students are forced to sign up and get access to the course; so many researches highlight that it would be much more useful to have complete access at all times and reuse elements in other courses.

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 use of Linked Data has been the approach used by the authors for years to face to the previous challenge. The goal is to significantly improve discovery, accessibility, visibility, and to promote reuse of open educational content in massive course.

Facets

Share this OCW

Inspect current OCW

Refine your search

Access the full description of the courses as published by the home institution, along with complimentary information such as language, license, author, country, geographic location of the institution and other semantically related information available via the Web.

Propose change

C. Hodgkinson-Williams, and E. Gray, “Degrees of Openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town,” International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT), 2009, Vol. 5, Issue 5, pp.101-116.

II. ISSUES OF OPENNESS

II. 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.

• On the other hand, in a higher level, they contribute to address the geographical and financial barriers between students, teachers and self-learners with distinguished educational institutions.

II. ISSUES OF OPENNESS

• The 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.

• The main contribution of this paper is to bring OERs to users who need them, specifically, and tosupport the MOOCs openness by reusing OERs.

III. 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.

Educational content

Open licenses

data in machine format

OPEN: "A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it” http://www.opendefinition.org/okd

OER semanticbased on LinkedData approach

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Linked Data technologies

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

• Linked 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.

IV. DESIGN OF THE FRAMEWORKOur approach is based on identifying distinctive features with the help of MOOC preferences and resources needs data. As with all recommender systems, the main goal is to help users to find information or resources and match information that is important about needs with information that is important about resources. Accordingly, the process can be broken down to the following steps:

1. Module 1 - data collect.

2. Module 2 – OER Data Publication

3. Module 3 – MOOC profiles provider.

4. Module 4 - Seeker of resources.

5. Module 5 - OER recommender.

Architecture for Seeker of OER

• Purpose: The framework we present in this paper aims to provide a service that allows you to discover and access open educational resources that are extracted from open repositories distributed.

• OER providers: Our principal OER providers are OCW institutions.

• Approach: 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.

Scenario

• There is a large amount of unstructured data of an OCW resource available on the Web, but only in a human-readable representation (HTML). Most OCW web sites do not have APIs for data consumption. So, the only other alternative for automatically reconstitute the underlying data from an OCW web site is to use web-scraping techniques.

• Data scraping were used to extracts data from OCW platforms that was later structured and stored in a database. Scraping eliminated the need for having to do the retrieval manually.

Architecture for Seeker of OER from LOCWD Triplestore .

Figure: Overview of conceptual map about general structure of OCW

LOCWD Vocabulary Modeling

Common data available from OCW websites are: title, knowledge area, open educational materials, open licenses, repositories, higher education institutions, content creators, fields of knowledge, learning guides, licenses, accessibility conformance, and others

Conclusions• The use of linked data approach on OER repositories provides the

framework for their evolution into a more interoperable and integrated system to sharing, connecting and discovering data and metadata of OCW initiatives. Based on the perspective of Linked Open Data, free open OER data also fosters interoperability and creates a basis on which the use, re-use, remix, and adaptation of open educational tools or commercial applications can be built more easily.

• The framework provides an approach that allows you to discover and access open educational resources that are extracted from open repositories distributed.

• The framework provides an approach that allows to MOOC Designers to discover and access open educational resources that are extracted from open repositories distributed. Our principal OER providers are OCW institutions.

EDUCON2014 – IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference

3-5 April 2014, Military Museum and Cultural Center, Harbiye, Istanbul, Turkey

Theme: "Engineering Education towards Openness and Sustainability"

GRUPO UPM GICAC

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

Thanks!

Edmundo Tovar (UPM) - Nelson Piedra (UTPL)