Prof. Panagiotis Bamidis (meducator EU Project Coordinator, Steering Committee OKFN Greece) Open Educational Data: the case of meducator project.

1. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Open Educational Data:
the case of the mEducator project
Panos Bamidis
Assist. Prof.
Medical Education Informatics
Medical School
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greece
MEI 2012
Thessaloniki
April, 2012 http://www.meducator.net

2. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Summary
 OERs
 A short account on OERs & MedEdu
 mEducator approach
 How OERs are treated with mEducator
technology
 Prospects
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

3. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Open Educational Resources
(OERs)
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4. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Open movement
 1980’s Open Source Software: GNU General Public License
(GPL) was designed not only to ensure that the software
produced by GNU will remain free, but to promote the
production of more and more free software
 focuses on communicating authorized use
 Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has the aim to
respond to the needs of educators and students for open,
adaptable resources and emphasizes the transformative
possibilities of digitally created and distributed resources
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5. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Freedoms
 Openness, therefore OER, should offer the following three
freedoms:
1. The freedom to study a work and apply knowledge offered from it.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of a work.
3. The freedom to make improvements or other changes, i.e. to make
adaptations, to the content of a work, and the freedom to release modified
copies of it.
 Give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right
to be properly acknowledged and cited.
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6. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

7. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Medical Education: facts & challenges
 Medical professionals need to update their knowledge and skills regularly in order to
confront the increased needs in treatment and research
 Continuing medical education (CME) tends to be considered compulsory in most
countries
Facts Challenges
• medical and biomedical information & • how to provide expert knowledge in
knowledge (basic & core) is ever remote institutions
expanding • how to provide more audience to
• medical disciplines and educators overspecialized educators located at
become increasingly overspecialized remote institutions
• Educational content is made available in • how to communicate and exchange
individual academic institutions (not only knowledge but also)
expertise in skills and competences
Medical education is based on a broad range of learning content, which,
nowadays, in its most part, is also available and distributed digitally
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8. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Web 2.0 (social web) advances
 highlighted the importance of:
– Openness
– enabled social collaboration & improved participation
– Emergence of social networking & Social intelligence
– key new terms: “apomediation”, “disintermediation” (Eysenbach, 2008).
– One’s “fame” in the web?
 Web 2.0 role in educational processes
 Shifted focus from educators to educational resources
 ...shared by online communities of learning through various
open educational repositories.
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

9. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Web2.0 notions in mEdcuator
platforms
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

10. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Web3.0 (semantic web)
 emphasis on the notion of linked data
 publishing of structured data so that it can be interlinked
more effectively and hopefully become more useful.
 Shifted focus from serving web pages for human readers
into sharing information in a way that can be read
automatically and “understood” by machines.
 Inevitably this enables data from different sources to be
connected in a better way and be queried more effectively
and efficiently.
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

11. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
What is mEducator?
 A Best Practice Network (BPN) co-funded by the
– eContentplus 2008 programme of the European Commission,
Information Society and Media Directorate-General, Digital
Content & Cognitive Systems
 Start Date: May 1st , 2009
 Duration: 3 years
 Contract Reference: ECP-2008-EDU-418006
 As a BPN, it compares different solutions (2) to draw
best practice recommendations
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12. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
mEducator Partners
Coordinator, Technology provider, Content provider, User/Evaluation,
1 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki GR
Dissemination
2 University of Cyprus CY Technology Provider, Content provider, User/Evaluation, Dissemination
3 Democritus University of Thrace GR Content provider, Technology provider, User/Evaluation, Dissemination
4 MEDTING Medical Exchange Limited IR Content provider, Technology provider, Dissemination
5 Technical Univ. of Cluj-Napoca RO Technology provider, Pedagogical expert
6 Université Nice Sophia Antipolis FR Content provider, User
7 Medical University Plovdiv BG Pedagogical expert, Content provider, User
8 Università degli studi di Catania IT Pedagogical expert, Content provider, User/Evaluation
9 University of Helsinki FI Pedagogical expert, Evaluation
UK Standardisation Body, Pedagogy Expert,
10 St George's Hospital Medical School
Technology and Content Provider
FR
11 Succubus Interactive Content and Technology Provider
UK
12 The Open University Technology Provider
13 Coventry University UK Content provider, Technology provider
14 European Cervical Cancer Association FR User/Evaluation
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13. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
mEducator central idea
 discover, retrieve, use, rate, re-use and
re-purpose educational content irrespective of
any Learning Management System use
 providers and users of such content may be
– expert instructors (academics / health professionals)
– students / learners
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14. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Ultimate goal…
 provide mechanisms for content publishing, discovery, & retrieval
 analyze policies and mechanisms for content evaluation, rating,
renewal and repurposing
 elaborate on intellectual property rights for educational material
 test the impact of true interoperability, repurposing, enrichment,
and embedding of a variety of highly attractive and up-to-date
learning resources in each of the partners’ curricula
 provide recommendations on how to implement interoperable
educational content discovery and retrieval networks
14

15. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
mEducator “content”
refers to any type of educational material with a
registered history of creation and evolution
 Is linked with
– specific educational goals and objectives
– learning outcomes
– educational contexts/settings
 comes recommended with
– certain types of teaching methods & strategies
15 – and/or assessment

16. Personal Blogs
co-funded by the
Class Discussion Forums
European Commission
eContentplus programme
eTrace –
Graphics annotation based lessons
16

17. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
17

18. The mEducator resource schema
 Emphasis on repurposing histories…
 Describing Repurposing histories...
 Metadata schema extensions
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19. Conceptual Model - Overview
MedBiquitous Annual 1
Conference 2011 9

20. Conceptual Model - In detail
MedBiquitous Annual
Conference 2011 20

21. RDF Model
title Medical creator
Resource John
educationalObjective
keywords Member Of
s
Cardiology OxfordUniversity
sameAS Is located
was founded
MESH SNOMED Term
Term
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22. Additional capabilities of the model
 static user-edited or automatically generated
metadata fields
 the emerging, dynamic information clouds that
surround a learning resource when users
comment on it, tag it etc, i.e. by a combined use
of strict taxonomies/controlled vocabularies with
folksonomies.
 Enrichment: maps profile fields to existing Linked
Open Data vocabularies and ontologies
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23. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Some interconnected
mEducator3.0 platforms
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

24. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Google-Mapping histories of a resource
Konstantinidis et al, Geotagged Repurposed Educational Content through mEducator Social Network to Enhance
Biomedical Engineering Education”, In Proceedings of 12th MEDITERRANEAN CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL AND
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING, MEDICON 2010, Springer-Verlag, 2010.
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25. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Conclusions
 The current mEducator consortium will be
transformed into the mEducator partnership
when the current research funding expires at
the end of May 2012.
 The mEducator partnership will be created to
promote the sustainability of mEducator
outcomes.
 Numerous synergies with OKFN...
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Medical Education Infromatics, MEI 2012, Thessaloniki, April 2012

26. co-funded by the
European Commission
eContentplus programme
Associate Partnership
Application
Register and join the mEducator community
26 http://www.meducator.net