Learning Object Repositories:
a learner centered perspective
Julià Minguillón
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Table of contents
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Learning Objects and Repositories
LOR for Statistical resources
Virtual Learning Environments
Idealizing a LOR
Our reality: DSpace
Improving learner’s experience
Open issues
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Pedagogy
Learning
Objects
Computer
Science
J. Minguillón
Information
Science
Repositories
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Learning
Objects
CONTENT
(digital)
METADATA
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Learning Objects
• Main goals:
– Help learners to acquire and develop a
competence, skill, ability, …
– Help teachers (and learners) to create new LOs
• Desired characteristics:
– Small to medium granularity
– Described according to educational purposes
– High level of connections between LOs
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Learning Objects
• LOs are diverse:
– Courses
– Exercises
– Examples
– Multimedia elements
– Simulations
– Source code
– Data
– Equations
– Other
J. Minguillón
SCORM, LD, HTML, …
PDF, QTI, …
PDF, PPT, ODP, …
JPEG, MP3, MOV, …
Applets, Flash
C, Java, …
XLS, SPSS, …
LaTeX, MathML, …
CML, XML, …
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Learning Object Metadata
• Proposed metadata scheme: IEEE LOM
– 9 categories including Technical, Educational,
Relation and Classification
– No required fields but plenty of them (> 70)
– Can be “reduced” to unqualified Dublin Core
• But, what the □ □ □ □ is “5.4 Semantic density”?
• Who will fill out over 70 fields?
• What is the title of an exercise?
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Describing LOs
• Only fill out fields that:
– …can be automatically filled
– …are needed for preservation purposes
– …will be used for retrieving (i.e. author?)
• Establish two or three levels of metadata:
– Minimum, mandatory fields
– Desirable
– Complete
J. Minguillón
Progressive
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Repositories
• Two main goals:
– Ensure preservation (keep the mummy)
– Promote reutilization
(show the mummy)
• These goals are somehow contradictory!
(even if the mummy is digital)
• Institutional top-down position prevails
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Traditional perspective
• Library centered:
– Books, journals, works, …
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(mostly textual)
Everything has a unique title
Everything has one or more authors
Everything has a creation date
Everything has a source
Almost everything is a PDF file
• Main goal: easily finding a resource by
using a minimum set of common descriptors
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Repositories
• Several possibilities:
General purpose
Top-down
Institution driven
Content
Thematic
Bottom-up
Community driven
Links to content
• No discussion: open access
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Case of study: LOR on Statistics
• Why Statistics?
– Basic competences for the Information Society
– Compulsory course for several degrees
– Thousands of students each semester (≈ 4000)
– Large collection of heterogeneous resources
• Known problems:
– “There are too many resources”
– “I don’t know how to start”
– “I can’t link concepts and tools”
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Our proposal
• From a teaching perspective:
– Build a thematic open LOR on Statistics
– Bottom-up approach (teachers)
– Integrate the LOR into the learning process
– Engage learners into using the LOR
• From a research perspective:
– Learning by doing
– Create better user interfaces for LORs
– Analyze user behavior
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Key factors for LOR success
• Three dimensions (McNaught, 2006):
– Resources: what?
– Actions: how?
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Users: who?
• Why? (Margaryan and Littlejohn, 2008)
• User Centered Design methodology
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Key factors for LOR success
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Genuine need of a community
Enthusiastic promoters
Clear direction and focus
Feedback from the community
Good management processes
Open access
Easy addition of new resources
Critical mass
Suitable granularity
J. Minguillón
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EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Adopting E-Learning
• Three dimensions (Bates, 2005):
– Methodological
– Technological
– Organizational
• Not completely orthogonal: interconnected
• LORs are basic infrastructure of VLEs
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Virtual Learning Environments
• E-Learning is de facto web-based learning
• VLEs enable learner centered models
Users
Services
Contents
J. Minguillón
Learning
Process
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Data
Mining
VLE
Learning
Object
Repository
LO
LO
J. Minguillón
User
Interaction
LO
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Learning
Process
evidences
ontologies
itineraries
user
profile
LD+ player
LOs
LOR
default itinerary
personalized itineraries
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Critical issues in LOR design
• Methodological: (Wiley, 2007)
– Learning is more than just content
• Technological (back-end + user
interface):
– Learning is more than just browsing
and searching LOs
• Organizational:
– Workflow, licenses, metadata, policies, …
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
What users want from a LOR
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More exercises and examples (55.7%)
More simulations and interactive LOs (36.7%)
Submitting questions about a LO (50.6%)
Ranking LOs (43.0%)
Correcting small mistakes (41.8%)
Adding the LO as favorite (36.7%) by using:
– delicious (11.4%)
– Other (51.9%)
– None (26.6%)
• Nothing: just browsing and searching (16.4%)
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Ideal LOR
• Basic premise: the act of browsing and/or
searching for resources should be a
learning experience in itself
– LOs are not isolated pieces
– “Developing” requires knowing “from” and “to”
– Users should be able to organize LOs
– Connectivism (Siemens, 2005)
• Ideal UI: conceptual map + “social layer”
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Ideal LOR
• Basic premise: once a LO has been
found, learners should be able to
– Rate
– Make comments / questions
– Make favorite
– Share
– Subscribe
• The LO becomes part of learner’s context
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
System architecture
PIM
Services
LO
UI
Social
layer
LOR
PIM
PIM
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Enhancing DSpace
• Main idea:
– Use DSpace as an invisible back-end
– Access LOs through persistent handles
– Create a new user interface
– Add 2.0 functionalities, maybe 3.0
– Gather and analyze usage data
• Goal: allow learners to take control over
LOs without using DSpace directly
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
DSpace pros and cons
• Why DSpace? → already in use at UOC
• Pros:
• Cons:
– Solid, stable
– Large community
– Persistent handles
– Preservation
– Customizable
– OAI PMH
– API, RSS
J. Minguillón
– Ugly user interface
– 1.0 philosophy
– Dublin Core
– Multilingualism
– Intricate
– Mainly for e-prints
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Improving interaction
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Avoid Google-like searches
Contextualized browsing
Refine search results while being built
Return only a few relevant LOs
Visualize related LOs
Allow learners to use web 2.0 services
Widget-ize available services
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
New user interface
• Three complementary elements:
– List of competences
– Tag cloud of keywords
– Visual taxonomy
Competences
Ontology
LO
• Additional filters:
– Resource type
– Language
J. Minguillón
LO
LO
Keywords
Taxonomy
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
LO
proportion
LO
LO
LO
mean
test
box-plot
variance
Student’s t test
• To compare two means
• To choose a test
• To compute a coefficient
• ...
J. Minguillón
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EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Open issues
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IEEE LOM vs Dublin Core and OAI PMH
Filter and then find vs find and then filter
Use of upper ontologies for describing LOs
Combining thematic repositories
Multilingualism: UI, content and metadata
Usability, accessibility and mobility issues
• Ideas, people and funding are welcome!!!
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
References and bibliography
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Bates, A.W. (2005). Technology, E-learning and Distance Education, Routledge.
Margaryan, A. and Littlejohn, A. (2008). Repositories and communities at cross-purposes: issues in
sharing and reuse of digital learning resources. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 24, 333-347.
McNaught, C. (2006). Are Learning Repositories Likely To Become Mainstream In Education? In:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies,
Setubal, Portugal, 11-13 April, IS9-IS17.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of
Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. 2(1), 3–10.
Wiley, D. (2007). Content is infrastructure. Terra incognita. Available at
http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/10/03/content-is-infrastructure/
McGreal, R. (2004). Learning Objects: A Practical definition. International Journal of Instructional
Technology and Distance Learning, 1(9).
Monge, S.; Ovelar, R.; Azpeitia, I. (2008). “Repository 2.0: Social Dynamics to Support Community
Building in Learning Object Repositories“. Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning
Objects (formerly IJKLO), 4.
Thomas, A. and Rothery, A. (2005). Online repositories for learning materials: the user perspective.
Ariadne, 45. Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/thomas-rothery/
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain
Thank you!
• Contact information:
Julià Minguillón
jminguillona@uoc.edu
CC-BY-NC-SA
http://www.slideshare.net/jminguillona
J. Minguillón
EdReNe – 4th Strategic Seminar, March 24th - March 26th 2010, Barcelona, Spain