The LUCERO Project » openlearn

DiscOU: Discoverability of Open Educational Content

Mathieu — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 14:07:01 +0000

If there is one scenario that was prominent in driving the development of Linked Data at the Open University, it is the one related to the discovery of educational resources. Indeed, there is a basic assumption that providing structured, open and addressable descriptions of resources helps making these resources more visible. In fact, most of my early presentations of LUCERO (but, for some reasons, not the ones that are online) included a picture of somebody saying “I’ve just seen a very interesting BBC programme. What is there at the OU that can help me learn more about it?”. Two years later, we actually have a systems that does exactly that!

Indeed, with support from the Open University’s “Open Media Unit”, we built an application that can semantically analyse the textual content of online resources and match it agains semantically indexed Open University content (OpenLearn Units and Podcasts at the moment) . The result (implemented as a set of REST services, some Javascript and a bookmarklet) is, if I might say so myself, super cool. It’s called:

DiscOU

(and yes, we probably should have put more effort in choosing the name).

The whole thing is pretty much a combination of linked data and information retrieval technologies. The Open University resources are crawled through data.open.ac.uk, analysed using DBPedia Spotlight and indexed using Apache Lucene. A BBC programme page used as a starting point would pretty much go through the same process, using the RDF description of the programme from the BBC website, analysing the textual components and matching the results to indexed resources. Because we use DBpedia Spotlight, the resources are described (and indexed) based on DBpedia entities, which allows us to semantically characterise their overlap, based on the links between common entities. It also makes it possible for the user to customise the search process based on his/her own interests.

Publishing OpenLearn metadata as linked data

Mathieu — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:51:49 +0000

OpenLearn is a website giving free access to Open University course material. We especially look at the “LearningSpace” where hundreds of HTML documents, called OpenLearn Units, are made available. These units represent very valuable resources for students as they provide entry points into specific topics, useful in particular in deciding whether or not to enroll in a course on this topic. A lot of these units relate directly to specific courses as their content is obtained from the corresponding course material. Being able to query and use such metadata in connection with other sources of information can be very useful in applications supporting students in the discovery of learning resources, as demonstrated by the OpenLearn Linked Data application developed by Fouad Zablith.

Representing an OpenLearn unit is realised through a specific class called OpenLearnUnit, which is a subclass of foaf:Document. Most of the common fields, such as title, subject and description of the unit are represented through common Dublin Core properties. A specific property relatesToCourse is used to relate a unit to the corresponding course in the Course Description dataset. We also use the Creative Commons Rights Expression vocabulary to express the license attached to the content of the unit (mostly Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence) and the Nice Tag Ontology to connect units to the keywords they have been tagged with.

While all this information is already available in structured form from the OpenLearn websites (through XML descriptions and RSS feeds), having it in directly accessible, Web addressable and queryable makes it easier to create new interfaces, new links and new processess that facilitates the use of this information for resource discovery. Some elements are still being investigated, regarding in particular the complex connection that might exist between an OpenLearn unit and the corresponding course material as described in the library catalogue.

ROLE Widget Consumes Linked Data

fouad — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:04:51 +0000

This is a guest post by Alexander Mikroyannidis, a researcher at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, discussing the use of http://data.open.ac.uk to identify related material to OpenLearn units within a Moodle block.

The winning application of the KMi Linked Data Application Competition has attracted the interest of the ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments – www.role-project.eu). The OpenLearn Linked Data application was originally developed by Fouad Zablith as a showcase of querying data.open.ac.uk for educational resources related with OpenLearn courses. I have now transformed this application into a widget that can be directly embedded into any OpenLearn course as a Moodle block. The widget displays a list of Open University courses, iTunesU podcasts, as well as OpenLearn tags related to the course that the user is currently viewing. As data.open.ac.uk is constantly growing by integrating metadata from more repositories, the widget will also be extended with recommendations about educational resources of additional types. You can try out the current release by logging in as guest at: http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/role/moodle/course/view.php?id=3.

This widget is part of the widget bundles developed by ROLE for providing self-regulated learning support. ROLE is aiming at empowering learners for lifelong and personalised learning within a responsive open learning environment. OpenLearn comprises one of the project’s test-beds concerning the transition from formal learning towards informal learning, where the learner is in control of the whole learning process. For more information about the learning technologies developed so far by ROLE, please visit the Showcase Platform (http://www.role-showcase.eu/).

Results of the KMi Linked Data Application Competition

Mathieu — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:36:20 +0000

One of the biggest worry we had at the beginning of LUCERO was that we were promising quite a lot: we were not only going to establish the processes to expose public university data as linked data, but also to demonstrate the benefit of it through applications. Originally, we naively thought that we were going to build two demonstrators, providing obvious and complete illustrations of the ways in which linked data could support students and researchers in better accessing information from the university, and better exploit it. We quickly discovered that this “killer app” approach wasn’t going to work, as the benefits of linked data appear to be a lot more in the many “day-to-day” use cases, rather than in large, “clever” application projects. In other words, as clearly shown in both Liam’s post and Stuart’s post, data.open.ac.uk is quickly becoming an essential resource, a piece of the information infrastructure, that benefits use cases, scenarios and applications of all sorts and scales.

That’s when we thought of organising a linked data application competition in KMi. KMi is full of very smart people, researchers and PhD students with the skills, knowledge and energy to build this sort of apps: lightweight, web or mobile applications to demonstrate one specific aspect and one specific use of the Open University’s linked data. I’m not going to give all the details of the way the competition was organised. We received four incredibly interesting applications (the promise of winning an iPad might have helped). This four applications are now featured on the brand new Data.open.ac.uk Application Page together with other applications currently being developed.

So, congratulations to our winners! The choice was really difficult (and you might not agree with it), as the applications described below are all great examples of the many things that can be achieved through opening up and linking university data.

The Winner: OpenLearn Linked Data (Fouad Zablith)

OpenLearn Linked Data makes use of data from data.open.ac.uk to suggest courses, podcasts and other OpenLearn units that relate to an OpenLearn Unit. The application takes the form of a bookmarklet that, when triggered while browsing the webpage of an OpenLearn unit, will add to the page small windows with links to the relevant course in Study at the OU, to podcasts from the OU podcast repositories and units from OpenLearn that share a common tag.

The great thing about this application is that it addresses scenarios directly relevant to students, prospective students and users of OpenLearn in general. It very naturally exploits the way linked data removes the boundaries that exist between different systems within the Open University, without having to change or integrate these systems.

Second Place: OU Expert Search (Miriam Fernandez)

The OU Expert Search system (accessible inside the OU network only) allows users to find academics at the Open University who are experts in a given domain, providing a ranked list of experts based in particular on their research publications. It uses information about publications in ORO and computes complex measures to provide a ranking of the people who are most likely to be experts in the given domain. It also integrates data obtained from the staff directory of the Open University to provide contact details for the people in the system.

Here as well the strong point of the application is its apparent simplicity. It is very easy to use and has been applied already for example to find Open University experts on Volcanoes (see Stuart’s blog post). Expert search is a complex task, and OU Expert Search, through the use of linked data, makes it look rather simple.

OUExperts (Vlad Tanasescu)

OUExperts is a mobile (android) application to find Open Univeristy experts in a given domain, and connect to their social network. Similarly to the OU Expert Search application, it relies on information related to the scientific publications of OU researchers, as available in ORO. It also finds synonyms of the given keywords, and tries to connect to the pages of the listed researchers.

The interesting aspect of OUExperts, apart from being a mobile application, is the clever attempt to connect to social networking website, so that it is not only possible to find an expert, but also to connect to them on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Buddy Study (Matthew Rowe)

Buddy Study suggests potential contacts and Open University courses to follow for students, based on the analysis of the topics in the user’s Facebook page. The application attempts to extract from the user’s Facebook page prominent topics, which are then matched to the interests of other people, and to the topics covered by courses at the Open University.

In this case, it is the social aspect of a user’s presence online which is used to create connections into the data from the Open University, creating easily accessible entry points to the data.