The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation including more than 50 independent sovereign states, created to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. Impressed by the work realised in the LUCERO project, by the deployment of data.open.ac.uk (the world’s first university linked data platform), and by the impact it had on The Open University and the broader higher education community, COL commissioned a report on the use and deployment of Linked Data principles and technologies for open and distance learning, which was published last week.
This report is based in large parts on the experience built in the last months of LUCERO, especially in connecting with other organisations and trying to gather common issues and practices, through LinkedUniversities.org.
The report covers the general principles underlying Linked Data technologies and their relevance to the field of education, especially focusing on open and distance learning. It illustrates use case scenarios of Linked Data for learning and teaching through describing existing applications, and details the process of adopting and deploying Linked Data for educational resources and learning-related information. Through publishing it on its website under an open license, COL hopes that this report will become a valuable resource to a wide variety of organisations, raising the general awareness of the benefits of using open Web technologies such as Linked Data for educational purposes.