A New Architecture for Cross-Repository Creation and Sharing of Educational Resources

Abstract

Abstract-A large amount of educational resources are currently available in the Internet, covering educational needs for many school grades. However, using such wealth of material, typically dispersed in several repositories, in a simple and effective way, is rather challenging due to the difficulties encountered by teachers in learning the peculiar access and operational procedures that each repository system requires. Therefore, it is important to provide the teachers with a centralized, integrated, simple system that can address most of their needs so that every operation (search, edit, share, download) can be done from a single location. This work follows this direction by designing and presenting both an architecture to integrate different repository systems using the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API and an integration layer that provides a simple web interface suitable for the needs of both the content creators (teachers) and the users of the contents (learners). Results have been evaluated both quantitatively, i.e., using performance indicators such as response time, and qualitatively, on the basis of the user experience evaluated through a questionnaire. Both type of results show that the platform adequately addresses user needs therefore it has the potential to be embraced by a large user community. Keywords-computer uses in education, e-learning tools, CMIS, open source IntroductionIn the latest years the interest for e-learning systems is steadily increasing due to the many advantages they are expected to deliver, e.g., lower costs, better course adaptation for students, remote delivery, etc. The abundance of such software suites led to the current situation in which there is a strong fragmentation in the e-learning software suites adopted by even very similar education institutions [7]. For instance, our university relies on Alfresco while the other university in the same city is using Nuxeo. Clearly, a situation in which each institution proceeds on its own is not ideal since network and saving effects cannot be exploited. The Italian Ministry of Education, for instance, is pushing towards unification efforts by supporting projects for the creation of mini-portals and similar initiatives. However, a large amount of material has been made available in each of those institutional repositories and it would be desirable to be able to reuse it, without waiting for major infrastructure changes, through simple means, e.g., uniform access platforms and interfaces.Some solutions trying to address the fragmentation and heterogeneity of repositories have been proposed in the past. The latest trend is to use Unified E-learning Repositories (UER) that attempt to simplify sharing resources between different institutions using a single access point and solution [8]. However, several integration issues need to be solved, in particular for distributed searches [9], [10] and communication between repositories [11].Interoperability requires a common framework both for interfaces and queries. The...

Produção científica sobre repositórios de recursos educacionais abertos no ensino superior em bases de dados

“…Alguns estudos têm como base a pesquisa de objetos e repositórios de objetos de aprendizagem, utilizando esses termos específicos (GASPARETTI et al, 2018;GONÇALVES;PÉREZ COTA;PIMENTA, 2011;MACLAREN, 2004;COHEN, 2012) VIDAL, 2006;DAGIENE;GUDONIENE;BARTKUTE, 2018;FAVARIO;MASALA, 2017;HSU;YANG, 2008;QUEIRÓS, 2009QUEIRÓS, , 2010MANOUSELIS et al, 2010;MOURIÑO-GARCÍA et al, 2018;PADRÓN et al, 2004;PEREIRA et al, 2018b;LEAL, 2013); web semântica (BROOKS; MCCALLA, 2006;PEREIRA et al, 2018b;PIEDRA et al, 2015;VEGA-GORGOJO et al, 2015); ontologias (GLUZ et al, 2016;GUERRERO;MINGUILLÓN, 2006) e linked data (NAHHAS et al, 2018;PEREIRA et al, 2018b;PIEDRA et al, 2015;VEGA-GORGOJO et al, 2015).…”

Construction of Educational Resource Metadata Management Platform Based on Service-Oriented Architecture

“…Many colleges and universities will use substandard document formats for the storage of educational resource information in the database at will because they do not understand the standards, which will bring great difficulties to retrieval, and even if they are connected to the network, it is difficult to share them. Service architecture is essentially a method of constructing distributed application systems, which provides business application functions in the form of services, so as to better assemble and reuse multiple subsystems and jointly build a resource cloud sharing system with loose coupling and high sharing [8]. How to give a standard resource description to the educational resource database, intelligently and seamlessly aggregate it, and help educators find the required resources quickly and accurately is the focus of this paper.…”