LEARNING OBJECT REPOSITORIES CHALLENGING GOOGLE – THE USERS’ POINT OF VIEW

K. Clements1, À. Gras-Velázquez2, J. Pawlowski1

1University of Jyväskylä (Finland) 2European Schoolnet (Brussels)kati.clements@jyu.fi, agueda.gras@eun.org, jan.m.pawlowski@jyu.fi

Contents of this presentation:

•Definitions•Motivation for the

study•Describing the

empirical study•Methodology•Findings•Conclusions•Questions?

Definitions

•Learning object (LO)▫“Any digital entity that may be used

for learning, education or training”•Learning object

Repositories(LORs)▫“Collections of learning objects

accessible to users via network without prior knowledge of the collections”

•Open Educational Resource (OER)▫Learning object freely (without

cost) available to the end user

Learning Resource Exchange LRE

Motivation for the study

•Repositories are not used up to their full potential – why?

•In a world where Google has become the ‘de facto’ for searching information – why would teachers use repositories instead?

•Are there advantages in using repositories?

•Past research has recognized a serious concern for quality of searched resources retrieved by a search engine such as Google

Empirical study Methodology

•Controlled experiment with teachers in a workshop setting

•N=46 teachers carried out experiments on learning objects discovery and reuse for preparing lesson plans based on the resources

•The data was gathered by surveys

Who were the teachers?•40% male, 60% female•Science, Maths and ICT teachers•Average 40 years old with •Over 10 year of teaching experience•Teaching 6-21 year old students•80% had advanced ICT skills

Pilot around Europe

46 Teachers fromBelgiumPortugalLithuaniaRomania

In the experiment, teachers were asked to create a lesson plan including: •1 image•1 simulation•1 interactive simulation•1 animation to be used as an

activity/exercise by the students

•70% were using LRE for the task, •30% were using Google for the task

Learning Resource Exhange

•39 000 Learning objects,

•90 000 Learning assets

•from many different countries and providers, including 16 Ministries of Education

• http://lreforchools.eun.org

The basic test criteria were:

•Time taken to find the resource in a portal (the less the better)

•Number of clicks to start obtaining results (the less the better)

•Number of resources in correct language (the more the better)

Findings: Previous searching of OER

Discovery of resources

•Teachers who had experience on LRE before the beginning of the tests found resources using the LRE quicker than with Google.

=> Knowing how to search with LRE saves time for teachers

Finding doesn’t guarantee quality•On the other hand,

being able to find the resources quicker did not translate into actually being convinced about the resources quality, neither in Google nor the LRE.

LRE functionalities that the teachers found beneficial• teachers found less irrelevant content to the

topic they were search than when using Google. This means that when teachers use Google, they cannot know if they’ll find educational resources, but resources might be for other purposes like for economical use.

• The teachers can search directly by ‘topics’, which was a functionality they appreciated when making their lesson plans.

• Teachers found resources to match their descriptions better when using LRE.

• Teachers could easier locate resources with the appropriate age group of their pupils, where are with Google, the age that the resources are suitable for is often random.

Teachers recognise the following:•1) The repository must contain high quality resources,

•2) The repository must be technically up to date working (easy to use) and

•3) There needs to be a critical mass of content in which to search for resources.

Conclusions

•However, repository functionalities are not attractive enough to challenge search engines’ power to reach millions of resources with one search.

•The only way to really challenge search engines for users’ attention, repositories need to provide highly relevant content which the users can trust to be high quality.

Thank you! Any questions?

Send feedback/ask more:

Kati ClementsKati.clements@jyu.fiMattilanniemi 2,

40014Jyväskylän yliopisto,

FinlandTel.

+358505631805