There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

As an area, Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of individuals and organizations. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. The goal is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.Contributions address the following topics: i) user and item data that can be used to support learning recommendation systems and scenarios, ii) innovative methods and techniques for recommendation purposes in educational settings and iii) examples of educational platforms and tools where recommendations are incorporated.

Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning: Research Trends and Applications

Purpose - Research in the area of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve interoperability. The linked data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the web. To this end, it is obvious that the application of linked data principles offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. This paper aims to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, approaches are surveyed that are aimed towards a vision of linked education, i.e. education which exploits educational web data. It particularly considers the exploitation of the wealth of already existing TEL data on the web by allowing its exposure as linked data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. Findings - So far web-scale integration of educational resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. However, linked data principles increasingly are recognized by the TEL community. The paper provides a structured assessment and classification of existing challenges and approaches, serving as potential guideline for researchers and practitioners in the field. Originality/value - Being one of the first comprehensive surveys on the topic of linked data for education, the paper has the potential to become a widely recognized reference publication in the area.

Interlinking Educational Resources and the Web of Data: A Survey of Challenges and Approaches

This paper intends to contribute to the design of a pervasive infrastructure where new generation services interact with the surrounding environment, collecting data and applying management strategies. According to such perspective computing, storage and sensing become complementary aspects to be coordinated. In this way innovative and value-added services can be implemented by bridging Clouds with the Internet of Things. Heterogeneous resources can be aggregated and abstracted according to tailored thing-like semantics, thus enabling a Things as a Service paradigm, a way to build a "Cloud of Things" (CoT). This paper mainly focuses on the implementation of the underlying infrastructure at the basis of the CoT. An ad-hoc architecture and some preliminary background of this challenging view are provided and discussed, identifying guidelines and future directions.

Enabling the Cloud of Things

Ontology for attack detection: An intelligent approach to web application security

The wide availability of educational resources is a common objective for universities, libraries, archives and other knowledge-intensive institutions. Although generic metadata specifications (such as Dublin Core) seem to fulfill the need for documenting web-distributed objects, educational resources demand a more specialized treatment and characterization. In this article we focus on the use of learning-object specific metadata in digital repositories, as they are primarily incarnated in the LOM (learning object metadata) standard. We review relevant standards and practices, especially noting the importance of application profiling paradigms. A widespread institutional repository platform is offered by DSpace. We discuss our implementation of LOM metadata in this system as well as our interoperability extensions. To this end, we propose a potential LOM to DC mapping that we have put into use in DSpace. Finally, we introduce our implementation of an LOM ontology, as a basis for delivering Semantic Web services over educational resources

The Use of Metadata for Educational Resources in Digital Repositories: practices and Perspectives

Learning outcomes are statements that should accompany any type of educational material intended for lifelong learning. These statements deliver important information, which works as an indicator for students in the process of learning. However, in order for this information to be further utilizable within the context of intelligent e-learning applications, a more fine-grained definition and structure should be adopted. Having these in mind, we initially assign a strict and rather technical definition for the notion of learning outcomes, which is fully aligned, though, with their educational purpose. We then propose an ontological model for their representation and classification, which fully adheres to this definition. Our ultimate goal is to provide the mean for exploiting all aspects of knowledge implied by such statements within intelligent applications. To bear out this possibility, we apply our model to a selected piece of educational material provided by the Hellenic Open University.

An Ontology Model for Building, Classifying and Using Learning Outcomes

Java is a very popular programming language and many study programs in Informatics worldwide include courses particularly designed for its learning. It is considered as the best paradigm for introducing students with object-oriented programming and concepts. Considering Java's popularity, we initially make an attempt to model this language by using a quite expressing and rich knowledge representation structure, like is ontology. Our aim is to capture the semantics of Java concepts in a way that would render them utilizable by intelligent e-learning applications. Because the construction of an ontology is not an easy task, we follow very specific steps when building the Java ontology. We then take advantage of an already implemented model describing the structure of learning outcomes and combine it with our ontology, with a view to offer a more effective way in organizing the course of Java in the Hellenic Open University.

Modeling the knowledge domain of the java programming language as an ontology

Educational content plays a significant role in the process of delivering knowledge, that's why it needs to be designed carefully, following designated principles. Learning Objects (LOs) constitute a novel approach in the educational content's organization, bearing features that if effectively used could lead to enhanced e-learning services. What is missing from literature, though, is a common agreement about the LO's attributes and structure. For this reason, we initially try to specify the main characteristics of a LO and determine its functionality, especially in the context of distance education. Having realized its fundamental role in the instructional design process, we make explicit its correlation with educational objectives and other aspects of learning. Finally, in an attempt to capture all LO's characteristics and make them utilizable by e-learning applications, we propose a metadata schema, reflecting all features of a LO, as described in this work.

Modeling the characteristics of a learning object for use within e-learning applications

Open educational resources are currently becoming increasingly available from a multitude of sources and are consequently annotated in many diverse ways. Interoperability concerns that naturally ar...

Georgia D. Solomou

Papers

The Use of Metadata for Educational Resources in Digital Repositories: practices and Perspectives

An Ontology Model for Building, Classifying and Using Learning Outcomes

Modeling the knowledge domain of the java programming language as an ontology

Modeling the characteristics of a learning object for use within e-learning applications

A learning object ontology repository to support annotation and discovery of educational resources using semantic thesauri