EDUCON16 "Integrating OER in the design of educational material". Edmundo Tovar Caro. UPM. 11/04/2016

1. Integrating OER in the design
of educational material
Blended Learning and Linked-Open-Educational-Resources-Data Approach
IEEE EDUCON2016 will be held in the city of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Dusit Thani hotel from 11-13 April, 2016, http://www.educon-conference.org/educon2016/
Theme: "Smart Education in Smart Cities"
GRUPO UPM GICAC
this work is licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/
Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López
Universidad Técnica particular de Loja, Ecuador
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación
Loja, Ecuador
nopiedra@utpl.edu.ec, {jachicaiza, jalopez2}@utpl.edu.ec
Edmundo Tovar Caro
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos e Ingeniería Software
edmundo.tovar@upm.es
EDUCON2016 10-13 April 2016, Abu Dhabi, UAE

2. Purpose
• The purpose of this work is to show a way to
enhance the face-to-face classrooms with
integration of OERs, and thus create blended
learning instruction. The approach is based on
Linked Data for describe and publish OER.
• In this new paradigm for educational content
consumption and integration, Linked Open Data
for OER is expected to play a decisive and
productive role for blended learning. The
approach presented can be used to support
different blended-learning models.

3. OER materials abstain from
traditional copyright in lieu of
licenses that allow others to retain,
reuse, revise, remix, adapt, and
redistribute the digital resources.
Unlike traditionally copyrighted
material, these resources are
available for "open" use, which
means users (teachers, students and
self-learners) can edit, modify,
customize, and share them.
OERThe availability of open
licensing and the ability
to reuse and remix
content is central to
concept of open
educational resources.

4. THE CONTEXT: OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
– Education for all
• Education is an essential tool for individuals and
society to solve the challenges of the present and
seize the opportunities of the future. However,
the current provision of education is limited by
educational institutions’ capacity, consequently,
this resource is available to the few, not the
many.
• The digital revolution offers a potential solution
to these limitations, giving a global audience
unprecedented access to free, open and high-
quality educational resources.

5. THE CONTEXT: OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
– Free/Open Use, Re-Use, Distribution
• People want to learn. By providing free and open access to education and
knowledge, people can fulfill this desire. Students can get additional
information, viewpoints and materials to help them succeed.
• Workers can learn something that will help them on the job.
• Faculty can exchange material and draw on resources from all around the
world. Researchers can share data and develop new networks. Teachers
can find new ways to help students learn. People can connect with others
they wouldn’t otherwise meet to share information and ideas.
• Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly
shared again, increasing access and allowing new approaches.
• Anyone can access educational materials, scholarly articles, and
supportive learning communities anytime they want to.
From OER movement, education is available, accessible, modifiable and free.

6. • The blended learning model has been
recognized by giving students time to
reflect, to empower every learner to
participate and be “visible”, to enable
the instructor to provide oversight
and feedback “anywhere, anytime”.
• This is not a mere “bolting together of
disparate technologies with any clear
vision of the result. ”
• In the context of this work, blending
learning can be adopted to increase
student participation, engagement,
and interactivity, increase
connectivity with faculty and other
students, increase student
engagement and active participation
Blended
learning
Blended learning is the
organic integration of
thoughtfully selected
and complementary
face-to-face and online
approaches and
technologies.

7. ISSUES OF OPENNESS
• The first level consequences of an OER directly
based on the characteristics of a piece of open
knowledge, are to provide people the freedom
to use, reuse and redistribute.

8. Openness Challenges
• Therefore, a challenge for the community is promoting OER
initiatives with channels that facilitate the discovery, use
and reuse for teachers, students and self-learners
incorporate them in the educative practice.
• From a technical point of view, the openness of OERs
covers issues such as interoperability and discovery. In
previous work we have presented how these features can
be enhanced by applying Semantic Web technologies and
Linked Data.
• Along the same line, the contribution of this paper is to
bring OERs to users who need them, specifically, support
the MOOCs openness by reusing OERs.

9. Use of Linked Data on OER Domain
• The goal of Linked Data is to enable human
beings to easily share structured data via the
Web just as they share documents now.
• The philosophy of Linked Data is that the value
and usefulness of data increase in proportion
to their links with other data.
• On this ground, Linked Data uses the Web to
create different types of links among data
from different sources.

10. Linked Data technologies
• Linked Data technologies can also help to
integrate the work of disperse institutions
producing diverse linked data. L
• inked Open Data (LOD) is well known for
providing a extensive amount of detailed and
structured information.
• Linked Data vision enables a new generation of
open educational resources that can be
semantically described and connected with
other data and discoverable sources.

11. CHALLENGES TO ADOPTING OER
• The barriers that faculty cite impacting the adoption of
OER are related to the ease of finding, selecting the
appropriate resource and evaluation of OER.
• Difficults reported are: No comprehensive catalog; Too
hard to find what I need; Not enough resources for my
subject; Not knowing if I have permission to use or
change; Not relevant to my local context; Not high-
quality; Not used by other faculty I know; Lack of
support from my institution; Too difficult to integrate
into technology I use; Not effective at improving
student performance; Too difficult to change or edit;
Too difficult to use; Not current, up-to-date.

12. the goal is enhance the discoverability,
reuse and integration of OER into
classroom instruction. From a general
perspective, the framework is the
synergy between Linked OER Data
and human expertise.
Proposed
framework

13. Synergy
Human Expert and Linked OER Data System
The proposed framework combines the traditions of knowledge
sharing and creation with emergent technology to create a vast
ecosystem of openly shared educational resources, while
harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational
approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.
@nopiedra2016

14. The framework seeks to scale educational opportunities by
taking advantage of the power of the Internet, allowing rapid
and essentially free dissemination, and enabling people
around the world to access knowledge, adapt it to your needs,
connect and collaborate.
In addition, the framework encompasses resources, tools and
practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve
educational access and effectiveness worldwide. While
financial reasons might be particularly persuasive to students
and other educational stakeholders, the core purpose of
education is to support and improvement learning.

15. The education is seen as an essential, shared, re-used, adapted, and collaborative social
good. OER movement envisions a world where everyone, everywhere, anytime has
access to the high quality education and training they desire

17. CONCLUSIONS
• The OER should be designed to be easily adaptable for other users
to other purposes. It should have metadata sufficient for
discoverability. OER reusability means that the content is relevant
to the specific needs of a user, which is technologically accessible
and that it is sufficiently open for use, re-use, re-mix, adapt and re-
distribute.
• The philosophy of Linked Data is that the value and usefulness of
data increase in proportion to their links with other data. On this
ground, Linked Data use the Web to create different types of links
among data from different siloed data-sources. In line with this
vision of the Web, data and their relations come to play key roles.
The availability of data sources based on Linked Data principles help
to generate new opportunities to exploit AI techniques focused on
machine learning, knowledge representation, information
extraction, information integration and multi-agent environments.

18. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
• One of the primary benefits of an OER is that it can be discovered and adapted to
the needs of specific situations. The main contribution of this approach to OER
movement is that the Web of linked data constitutes an evolution of the current
OER ecosystem towards a global information space where browsing is driven by
structured and linked data rather than by HTML-documents as is now the case.
Consequently, we argue that these advances are a possible means of supporting
interoperability, accessibility and reusability of OER silos.
• Course designs are a collection of OER aggregated in a manner that resembles a
traditional courseware take many shapes and forms. When teachers set up
blending courses, it takes a great deal of pre-class organization. The material that
they teach in a traditional classroom setting must be transformed to fit the hybrid
medium. Teachers need to generate creative ways and uses good practices to
teach, re-use OER and converter the material from one medium to another so that
messages and meaning are not lost. This increases preparation time for teachers.
Furthermore, Teachers may be untrained and unfamiliar with the tools and
technology available. Typically, free digital versions of the learning paths can be
made available to other users as new OER. As future work, the authors are
developing an interface for creating learning paths that can be accessed from:
http://serendipity.utpl.edu.ec/learningpaths

19. Thanks!
IEEE EDUCON2016 will be held in the city of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Dusit Thani hotel from 11-13 April, 2016, http://www.educon-conference.org/educon2016/
Theme: "Smart Education in Smart Cities"
GRUPO UPM GICAC
this work is licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/
Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López
Universidad Técnica particular de Loja, Ecuador
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación
Loja, Ecuador
nopiedra@utpl.edu.ec, {jachicaiza, jalopez2}@utpl.edu.ec
Edmundo Tovar Caro
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos e Ingeniería Software
edmundo.tovar@upm.es
EDUCON2016 10-13 April 2016, Abu Dhabi, UAE