LOR based on Ontologies for Virtual Environments in Panamanian Higher Education
Nicholas Béliz Osorio, Maritza Morales, Elida González, Yazmina Villarreal, Victor Lopez, Boris Gómez, Ana Muñoz*
Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá,
Panamá
* Universidad de los Andes Mérida,
Venezuela
{nicholas.beliz, maritza.morales, elida.gonzalez, yazmina.villarreal, victor.lopez, boris.gomez}@utp.ac.pa, anamunoz@ula.ve
ABSTRACT
New approaches in the design of educational materials employ the concept of learning object. Learning objects are intended to achieve the
reuse of content to increase, effectively, the production of digital educational material. A key supporting this process are learning object
repositories which allow the management of them. In this scenario, the technologies related to Semantic Web play an important role. This
research proposes a semantic learning object repository, modeled through ontologies, describing educational concepts and processes
needed in the administration of a Semantic Learning Object Repository.
INTRODUCTION
Currently, Panama has no well-structured educational programs in pre-media, media and higher education, considering the potential
provided by new information technologies, so that each teacher / instructor has to generate its own content and the material he generates
normally is not reused by other teachers or students as support.
In higher education, some teachers use the Moodle( 1) platform to upload support material and to allocate formative and summative
activities for students. This platform allows teachers the management and administration of courses for their students, and is an ideal
medium for course evaluations. There are cases of duplicated courses, because there are teachers who teach the same course, so this
creates the need to efficiently manage the knowledge that is generated through digital content, making it publicly available to be reused
and shared.
With the integration of well-structured educational programs, digital content and ICT-based applications,new learning environments are
created in which communication, action and social interaction of educational agents are possible (Garcia & Marin, 2002). Thus, we
observe the use of ICT to support both on-campus and distance teaching and learning in universities. Distance education system has
evolved, through the implementation of virtual environments, enhancing the growth of what is now known as e-learning.
E-learning is a concept for teaching and learning assisted by information technology that has been developed extensively in higher
education, to conduct training and education processes. The teacher develops multimedia content, instructional content and objectives
with features that can be reused and referenced in different contexts, giving rise to learning objects (LO), which are organized and stored
in a database or container called Learning Object Repository (LOR).
To extend the reusability and interoperability of learning objects we will develop a model of semantic web, which will provide some level
of intelligence to the services that the learning object repository will provide. In the semantic web model, ontologies are the primary
means to represent knowledge. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to define a learning object repository supported by ontologies for
managing learning objects in virtual environments in Panamanian higher education.
In the next section we will define e-learning and learning object repository. Then we will make a brief introduction to Semantic Web.
Next, we will present some basic notions of ontology-based LOR. We will present our proposal in the next section and finally we will
conclude with the expected results of our research.
E-LEARNING
E-Learning is an interactive training system that makes massive use of electronic media to reach students that are usually in remote
locations.
Within e-learning environments participate individuals with different interests and objectives, systems with various functions and
heterogeneous technologies, and content with features, objectives and formats of all kinds. What is technically known as interoperability
is a challenge for the industry, ie environments or systems from different developers, for different applications and diverse content that
work together in distributed learning. Regarding the content, as part of interoperability, it is sought to be portable, reusable and
interchangeable between applications, this has given rise to the so-called learning objects (LO), these are content with a size and
characteristics that become easily manageable for e-learning systems.
The establishment of standards for the design and description of learning objects is vital. The potential benefits of reusability,
interoperability, durability and accessibility can only be achieved with a broad consensus about appropriate standards.
Learning Object Repositories
The current trend is to group and store LO in learning object repositories (LOR) (Lopez, 2005), (Leyva and Tamayo, 2006), (Leyva et all.,
2006), (Tamayo, 2007). By referring to repositories, the term reuse is usually omitted but reutilization of LO is the primary interest of
these systems, which typically guarantee their communication with different platforms. So they facilitate the work of content creators and
provide an effective way of knowledge management for organizations or individuals that generate it.
Reutilization is technologically guaranteed by the fact that the management of LO is based on the use of standards which define its
structure, packing and even communication (interoperability) between different systems.
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1 Moodle is a free software used by Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (Technological University of Panama) in virtual courses and
to support classroom courses
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services is defined,
allowing "understanding" and satisfying the requests of people and machines that use web content. The term Semantic Web was coined at
the beginning of year 2000 to refer to this extension and as a result of the work of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and other
organizations, the Semantic Web concept consolidated. Currently, the vision of the Semantic Web is related to the ability of machines to
accurately locate, read, interpret and process data created by hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations. The ideas, in turn,
have become tools and services.
The pillars of the Semantic Web are ontologies and annotations. Ontologies describe, formally, shared conceptualizations of a domain (eg,
people, meetings, etc.) and are stored in repositories. Annotations allow binding of ontology-based descriptions with existing Web
resources (for example, saying that the information contained in a web page refers to a person).
LOR based on Ontologies for Virtual Environments in the UTP
We decided to develop a learning object consolidated in a university because its curricula is structured and is closer to the philosophy of
the LOR. Currently, junior high school and senior high school education are in a process of curriculum transformation, which will allow,
in the future, the use of the learning objects banks generated with this proposal, in other Panamanian education levels.
Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá is developing distance learning in virtual environments since year 2000. Some developed careers are
Postgraduate and Master Degree in Education Informatic, distance coursed through virtual environments. Another example is the
Graduate Diploma in "Creation and Management of Virtual Learning Environments", endorsed by the Organization of American States for
the years 2010, 2011 and 2012. Additionally, the diploma has been run four times nationally.
All online courses, created by teachers, are administered through the Moodle platform and, for their administration, there is a support team
at the Center for Research, Development and Innovation in Information Technology and Communications (CIDITIC) which, in addition,
develops, manages and delivers the diploma courses.
Since the number of users of the Learning Management System (Moodle) increases every year, this creates the need to manage more
efficiently the generated knowledge, both by teachers through contents, as the students with their work and assessments. This knowledge
should be managed and made publicly available in order to be reused and shared.
This has led to the need for creation of a Semantic Learning Object Repository (based on ontologies) that enables the reuse of knowledge,
taking advantage of new developments in e-learning technologies such as learning objects and Learning Object Repositories. By creating
a SLOR, any user can access the knowledge in it, and indicate where knowledge is, in case it is not stored.
Creating a Semantic Learning Object Repository model will define a pattern for the development of any repository to implement in each
of the remotely issued careers, as well as the technology needed. This will allow to effectively increase production and reuse of digital
educational content and facilitate the transfer of knowledge to the higher-level student population in the Universidad Tecnológica de
Panamá.
By creating a model of technological infrastructure and establishing hardware and software requirements, teachers and researchers may
have immediate access to knowledge in their area. Through SLOR it is possible to create a space for projects in which researches could
develop, so that students and teachers from universities publish, share and reuse knowledges and researches, as shown in the following
figure.
SLOR is a mechanism that can support academic knowledge management in a virtual university, through content management in different
areas of knowledge. The virtual university being a trainer of human talent without limits of space and time, the molde will strengthen the
knowledge and, therefore, human talent.
METHODOLOGY
This project will work with the research-action-participation method, which combines two processes, knowing and acting, involving the
people whose reality is addressed, in both. Therefore, first we will investigate the methodologies for collaborative work, what is a learning
community and what are the dimensions or categories of the information associated with their performance. It is a know-act-transform
that recognizes learning styles (it knows who we are and how we learn). Personnel involved in the project will be trained in the areas of
semantic web and ontology concepts. As a result, the methodological strategies of collaborative work that will support the platform will be
established.
One of the paradigms of software development today is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
One idea behind SOA, the existence of producers and consumers of services, is a fertile ground to give a boost to the development of the
Semantic Web (SW), which has among its objectives that contents should not only be accessed and interpreted by people but also by
agents (robots, machines), which implies that a level of semantic interoperability be reached.
(Cabrera and Martinez, 2007), based on the ideas of the SW, propose a methodological approach to knowledge management which is an
embryo of the semantic repository prototype presented in (Tamayo, 2007).
In the mentioned work (Cabrera and Martinez, 2007), the methodology was validated by building an ontology for educational standards.
The ontology was defined in the OWL language, using Protégé. They also used Jena for the interface with the ontology and Pellet
reasoner to perform inferences.
The same methodological approach should be used for other domains, so that the ontology covers all areas of knowledge contained in
SCORM packages.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) for the repository and the rest of the tools that will be interacting (authoring tool, Moodle
Platform, Migration Tool) were chosen by using Semantic Web Services.
The purpose is to obtain a Semantic LOR that ensures more complex queries to the user that yield the expected results in each case. The
interface will perform the searches in the ontology, which will be in a layer above the actual SCORM packages.
Formal development
A learning objects repository is a system that stores educational resources and their metadata (or only the latter), and provides some kind
of search interface, both for interaction with humans or with other software. The repositories provide access to collections of educational
resources usually in electronic format, although most do not store educational resources itself but only its metadata. Therefore, it is
possible to find the same resource by different repositories. The basic functionality of a learning object repository is educational resources
seeking, and there are two types of repositories:
1. Interactive search interfaces for human use.
2. Query interfaces that can be used by software agents, for example through Web Services.
Sometimes, the same search method can serve both uses. However, it should be noted that search through the usual general purpose
mechanisms of information retrieval (Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto, 1999), such as those used by Internet search engines, must be
complemented by a guided search metadata. The simplest form of this type of search is to allow search for metadata fields. However,
these interfaces are sometimes not satisfactory so, currently, there are researches in advanced techniques to allow use of the knowledge
about the domain of metadata, for example, using ontologies.
Current repository of learning objects such as MERLOT or CAREO, generally describes the various existing educational resources on the
Web, storing metadata records associated with the objects described. This ensures a much more structured search of existing knowledge.
However, search is not the only advantage of repositories, for example, these permit cooperative revisions of learning objects, so that the
quality of the content is reviewed and challenged by the different participants that access the repository using Internet.
By providing a support to hold the metadata, these repositories play an important role in the future. Not only humans can consult and seek
information, but also external software agents or LMS systems (Learning Management Systems). To process the information in the
metadata, the presence of quality metadata is required, understanding that they meet a minimum structure and that the data provided are
consistent with a pre-established, uniform and, possibly, universal metadata scheme. The main problem of these repositories is the lack of
a conceptual model that establish what is a learning object and which metadata descriptors are associated with each of the different
conceptualizations. Without an universal agreement on the metadata model to use, and without certainty about the its composition, by the
creator of the metadata record, we are in a serious lack that difficults automation in these repositories. Currently, the quality of metadata
records depends, among others, on the following factors:




The information provided in the metadata depends on the kindness of the creator of the record and the time needed to add that
information.
Editing capabilities or tools provided by the repository.
The level of knowledge of the creator of the record on metadata standards for learning objects.
The conceptual model of the repository: what is a learning object for the creator of the record, and what metadata information
structure should have.
Including metadata information records about the content of learning objects facilitates several processes, such as storage, search and
retrieval from distributed repositories, and composition of new materials (among others). Accepting metadata specifications and standards,
stored learning objects are more interoperable and reusable, although there are still several notable drawbacks in metadata records from
repositories:


The standards defined information (such as IEEE LOM) is not geared to be processed by external agents. This fact difficults the
programming of applications with ability to formally interact with the repository.
The current standards are for descriptive purposes. They provide information about the content or format of the learning object,
but do not have an execution semantics for LMS or a formal model that provides meaning within the content of the metadata
records.
All exposed shortcomings derive in a problem for external agents about interpretation of existing elements in a repository. For example,
the knowledge that software agents posses and exchange is formalized in the form of ontology and, therefore, the only way to interpret the
knowledge contained in the metadata is through the use of an ontology that gives support to a formal model of conceptualization.
Other noteworthy problems have to do with interoperability and communication, since there are no restrictions on the use of the
specifications and no defined exchange scheme, these repositories are isolated in a closed system, whose only access window Web is the
interface offered from the application server. The functions of knowledge exchange between different repositories are impossible, because
there is no agreement or recommendation to regulate such transactions. Furthermore, no software agent can perform autonomous
interaction with them, for example, selecting between two learning objects with same objectives, depending on customer's preconditions.
Another example of the current limitations is the inability to operate with varying degrees of credibility or append new schemes to
repositories in order to process metadata records that contain cost planning, according to the levels of student knowledge (Soto & Garcia,
2005).
CONCLUSION
This paper presents the semantic model of a Learning Object Repository for UTP. This model will define the Learning Object Repositories
to be generated in the different careers offered by the UTP. The model will facilitate the implementation of the LOR in different
communities and universities. From the point of view of knowledge, the model will define the behavior of the different domains and
support the creation of new knowledge through different agents and the learning machine. This research will define some of the possible
technologies to be used to establish the repository, although this may vary depending on the progress in the supporting tools for creating
them.
With this innovative project, it is expected to train teachers and researchers in the use of semantic tools, to facilitate teaching and learning
in the context of education in our country. In addition, the project seeks to increase the use of ICT in education and provide teachers with
new tools, as would be the Semantic Learning Objects Repository of the UTP.
Realization of this project will allow students, teachers and researchers have a new way of constructing teaching- learning experiences and
researches, since we will have data on the Web defined and linked in a way that can be used more effectively for a discovery, automation,
integration and reuse across applications.
The project, itself, constitute an original contribution and an innovative experience on the national scenario, as it provides a technological
tool, increases the quality and size of the country in teacher training, supports improvements in pedagogical approaches and the
management of higher education.
As a result of the project, it will generate the technological model that will support different learning communities, including those which
work in collaborative projects (both research and industrial projects) and have no technological tools to do so. To implement the model,
we will work together with users in the early stages of defining its concepts and collaborative work processes, thus establishing a model
adapted to the user. This model can be projected to all learning communities that support collaborative work as a means of learning. The
adaptability of the model will come from learning objects that users develop in their knowledge area. This project is an incubation of
knowledge portals for education in any field of knowledge.
In addition we can establish the following products:
1. Semantic Repository of Learning Objects (knowledge base ready to be tested and adjusted)
2. Number of researchers, students and teachers trained in semantic web, ontologies, collaborative work (12 teachers, 8 students)
3. Creation of the following lines of research:
a. Knowledge Management in Education
b. Ontological Engineering and Semantic Web
c. Agents and Semantic Web
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