A Novel Approach towards Skill-Based Search and Services of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

Abstract. Open educational resources (OER) have a high potential to address the growing need for training materials in management education and training. Today, a high number of OER in management are already available in a large number of repositories. However, users face barriers as they have to search repository by repository with different interfaces to retrieve the appropriate learning content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is not generally supported. The European co-funded project OpenScout addresses these barriers by intelligently connecting leading European OER repositories and providing federated, skillbased search and retrieval web services. On top of this content federation the project supports users with easy-to-apply tools that will accelerate the (re-) use of open content.

Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments

“…OER was described (2002) as "technology enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes." The research on OER has been focusing on potential usage in varying contexts, ranging from higher education (Yuan et al, 2008) and schools (Richter & Ehlers, 2011) to the corporate world (Manisha & Bandyopadhyay, 2009;Ha et al, 2011). Those cross-context studies are often connected to barriers or challenges that hinder OER adoption.…”

“…Henderson (2007) described how the process of preparation of e-learning materials demands the analysis of cultural influence, especially when the separation of local, national, and international context of usage can be identified. Such separation of contextual modes is becoming even more prominent for OER as initiatives strive for aggregation of existing repositories or databases in one single access point (Ha et al 2011;Sotiriou et al, 2013). Additionally, social interaction and collaboration mechanisms are crucial components of such environments, and they increase cultural influence.…”

“…Such "collaborative content federations" (Ha et al 2011;Sotiriou et al, 2013) often provide materials in various languages, while the environments are not equally translated to support international users. While language skills and preferences vary across educational level and countries, the preferences of educators and learners in terms of language or collaboration are not well known.…”

“…The OER movement must consider the implications of knowledge sharing carefully, as many initiatives are basing their OER services and environments on social software-like functionalities that place educators and learners as key users to share, discuss, and collaboratively work on OERs (Ha et al, 2011;Sotiriou et al, 2013). Knowledge sharing is implying, in this case, not only sharing of OER but also the collaborative practices around the resources.…”

OERScout technology framework: A novel approach to open educational resources search

“…Recent examples of federated search include (i) BRENHET 2 proposed by De la Prieta, Gil, Rodríguez, and Martín (2011), which is a multi agent system (MAS) which facilitates federated search between learning object repositories (LOR); (ii) OpeScout (Ha, et al, 2011), which copies metadata from existing repositories to create an index of resources accessible through a faceted search approach; (iii) Global Learning Object Brokered Exchange (GLOBE), which acts as a central repository of IEEE LOM educational metadata harvested from various member institutional repositories (Yamada, 2013); and (iv) Pearson's Project Blue Sky (Kolowich, 2012), which is a custom search engine specifically concentrating on searching for OER with an academic focus. Semantic search is derived from semantic web technologies where people are considered as producers or consumers and machines as enablers.…”