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Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
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    Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners
    (Setúbal, Portugal : Science and Technology Publications, Lda, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Mol, Stefan; Kismihók, Gábor; Lane, H. Chad; Zvacek, Susan; Uhomoibhi, James
    In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as us eful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.
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    Translating the Concept of Goal Setting into Practice: What ‘else’ Does It Require than a Goal Setting Tool?
    (Setúbal, Portugal : Science and Technology Publications, Lda, 2020) Kismihók, Gábor; Zhao, Catherine; Schippers, Michaéla; Mol, Stefan; Harrison, Scott; Shehata, Shady; Lane, H. Chad; Zvacek, Susan; Uhomoibhi, James
    This conceptual paper reviews the current status of goal setting in the area of technology enhanced learning and education. Besides a brief literature review, three current projects on goal setting are discussed. The paper shows that the main barriers for goal setting applications in education are not related to the technology, the available data or analytical methods, but rather the human factor. The most important bottlenecks are the lack of students’ goal setting skills and abilities, and the current curriculum design, which, especially in the observed higher education institutions, provides little support for goal setting interventions.
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    Quality Prediction of Open Educational Resources A Metadata-based Approach
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Elias, Mirette; Kismihók, Gábor; Auer, Sören; Chang, Maiga; Sampson, Demetrios G.; Huang, Ronghuai; Hooshyar, Danial; Chen, Nian-Shing; Kinshuk; Pedaste, Margus
    In the recent decade, online learning environments have accumulated millions of Open Educational Resources (OERs). However, for learners, finding relevant and high quality OERs is a complicated and time-consuming activity. Furthermore, metadata play a key role in offering high quality services such as recommendation and search. Metadata can also be used for automatic OER quality control as, in the light of the continuously increasing number of OERs, manual quality control is getting more and more difficult. In this work, we collected the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis to observe the effect of quality control on metadata quality. Subsequently, we propose an OER metadata scoring model, and build a metadata-based prediction model to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on our data and model, we were able to detect high-quality OERs with the F1 score of 94.6%. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
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    OER Recommendations to Support Career Development
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Faraji, Ali; Mol, Stefan T.; Kismihók, Gábor
    This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous and strategic about their own skill development. Subsequently, high-quality, on-line, personalized educational content and services are also essential to serve this high demand for learning content. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have high potential to contribute to the mitigation of these problems, as they are available in a wide range of learning and occupational contexts globally. However, their applicability has been limited, due to low metadata quality and complex quality control. These issues resulted in a lack of personalised OER functions, like recommendation and search. Therefore, we suggest a novel, personalised OER recommendation method to match skill development targets with open learning content. This is done by: 1) using an OER quality prediction model based on metadata, OER properties, and content; 2) supporting learners to set individual skill targets based on actual labour market information, and 3) building a personalized OER recommender to help learners to master their skill targets. Accordingly, we built a prototype focusing on Data Science related jobs, and evaluated this prototype with 23 data scientists in different expertise levels. Pilot participants used our prototype for at least 30 minutes and commented on each of the recommended OERs. As a result, more than 400 recommendations were generated and 80.9% of the recommendations were reported as useful.
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    XEL Group Learning – A Socio-technical Framework for Self-regulated Learning
    (Setúbal, Portugal : Science and Technology Publications, Lda, 2020) Eid, Shereif; Kismihók, Gábor; Lane, H. Chad; Zvacek, Susan; Uhomoibhi, James
    We describe XEL-Group Learning, a socio-technical framework for socially oriented e-learning. The aim of the presented framework is to address the lack of holistic pedagogical solutions that take into account motivational theories, socio–technical factors, and cultural elements in social learning networks. The presented framework provides initiatives for collaboration by providing a dynamic psycho-pedagogical recommendation mechanism with validation properties. In this paper, we begin by highlighting the socio-technical concept associated with socially-oriented e-learning. Next, we describe XEL-GL’s main mechanisms such as group formation and the semantic matching framework. Moreover, through semantic similarity measurements, we show how cultural elements, such as the learning subject, can enhance the quality of recommendations by allowing for more accurate predictions of friends networks.
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    An AI-based open recommender system for personalized labor market driven education
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier Science, 2022) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Faraji, Abdolali; Vrolijk, Jarno; Molavi, Mohammadreza; Mol, Stefan T.; Kismihók, Gábor
    Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated, not in the last place in engineering education, as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Anticipating and addressing such dynamism is a fundamental challenge to twenty-first century education. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven approach to the development of an open, personalized, and labor market oriented learning recommender system, called eDoer. We discuss the complete system development cycle starting with a systematic user requirements gathering, and followed by system design, implementation, and validation. Our recommender prototype (1) derives the skill requirements for particular occupations through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements
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    Combining statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students’ attitudes towards ICT in PISA
    (London : Taylor & Francis, 2021) Lezhnina, Olga; Kismihók, Gábor
    In our age of big data and growing computational power, versatility in data analysis is important. This study presents a flexible way to combine statistics and machine learning for data analysis of a large-scale educational survey. The authors used statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students’ attitudes towards information and communication technology (ICT) in relation to mathematical and scientific literacy measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 and 2018. Implementations of the random forest (RF) algorithm were applied to impute missing data and to predict students’ proficiency levels in mathematics and science. Hierarchical linear models (HLM) were built to explore relationships between attitudes towards ICT and mathematical and scientific literacy with the focus on the nested structure of the data. ICT autonomy was an important variable in RF models, and associations between this attitude and literacy scores in HLM were significant and positive, while for other ICT attitudes the associations were negative (ICT in social interaction) or non-significant (ICT competence and ICT interest). The need for further research on ICT autonomy is discussed, and benefits of combining statistical and machine learning approaches are outlined.
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    A Recommender System For Open Educational Videos Based On Skill Requirements
    (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Kismihók, Gábor
    In this paper, we suggest a novel method to help learners find relevant open educational videos to master skills demanded on the labour market. We have built a prototype, which 1) applies text classification and text mining methods on job vacancy announcements to match jobs and their required skills; 2) predicts the quality of videos; and 3) creates an open educational video recommender system to suggest personalized learning content to learners. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on the area of data science related jobs. Our prototype was evaluated by in-depth, semi-structured interviews. 15 subject matter experts provided feedback to assess how our recommender prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 250 videos were recommended, and 82.8% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Moreover, interviews revealed that our personalized video recommender system, has the potential to improve the learning experience.
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    Extracting Topics from Open Educational Resources
    (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University, 2020) Molavi, Mohammadreza; Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Kismihók, Gábor
    In recent years, Open Educational Resources (OERs) were earmarked as critical when mitigating the increasing need for education globally. Obviously, OERs have high-potential to satisfy learners in many different circumstances, as they are available in a wide range of contexts. However, the low-quality of OER metadata, in general, is one of the main reasons behind the lack of personalised services such as search and recommendation. As a result, the applicability of OERs remains limited. Nevertheless, OER metadata about covered topics (subjects) is essentially required by learners to build effective learning pathways towards their individual learning objectives. Therefore, in this paper, we report on a work in progress project proposing an OER topic extraction approach, applying text mining techniques, to generate high-quality OER metadata about topic distribution. This is done by: 1) collecting 123 lectures from Coursera and Khan Academy in the area of data science related skills, 2) applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on the collected resources in order to extract existing topics related to these skills, and 3) defining topic distributions covered by a particular OER. To evaluate our model, we used the data-set of educational resources from Youtube, and compared our topic distribution results with their manually defined target topics with the help of 3 experts in the area of data science. As a result, our model extracted topics with 79% of F1-score.
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    A Scholarly Knowledge Graph-Powered Dashboard: Implementation and User Evaluation
    (Lausanne : Frontiers Media, 2022) Lezhnina, Olga; Kismihók, Gábor; Prinz, Manuel; Stocker, Markus; Auer, Sören
    Scholarly knowledge graphs provide researchers with a novel modality of information retrieval, and their wider use in academia is beneficial for the digitalization of published works and the development of scholarly communication. To increase the acceptance of scholarly knowledge graphs, we present a dashboard, which visualizes the research contributions on an educational science topic in the frame of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). As dashboards are created at the intersection of computer science, graphic design, and human-technology interaction, we used these three perspectives to develop a multi-relational visualization tool aimed at improving the user experience. According to preliminary results of the user evaluation survey, the dashboard was perceived as more appealing than the baseline ORKG-powered interface. Our findings can be used for the development of scholarly knowledge graph-powered dashboards in different domains, thus facilitating acceptance of these novel instruments by research communities and increasing versatility in scholarly communication.