Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Item
    Accessibility and Personalization in OpenCourseWare : An Inclusive Development Approach
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 2020) Elias, Mirette; Ruckhaus, Edna; Draffan, E.A.; James, Abi; Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen; Lohmann, Steffen; Khiat, Abderrahmane; Auer, Sören; Chang, Maiga; Sampson, Demetrios G.; Huang, Ronghuai; Hooshyar, Danial; Chen, Nian-Shing; Kinshuk; Pedaste, Margus
    OpenCourseWare (OCW) has become a desirable source for sharing free educational resources which means there will always be users with differing needs. It is therefore the responsibility of OCW platform developers to consider accessibility as one of their prioritized requirements to ensure ease of use for all, including those with disabilities. However, the main challenge when creating an accessible platform is the ability to address all the different types of barriers that might affect those with a wide range of physical, sensory and cognitive impairments. This article discusses accessibility and personalization strategies and their realisation in the SlideWiki platform, in order to facilitate the development of accessible OCW. Previously, accessibility was seen as a complementary feature that can be tackled in the implementation phase. However, a meaningful integration of accessibility features requires thoughtful consideration during all project phases with active involvement of related stakeholders. The evaluation results and lessons learned from the SlideWiki development process have the potential to assist in the development of other systems that aim for an inclusive approach. © 2020 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.
  • Item
    Ontology-Based Representation for Accessible OpenCourseWare Systems
    (Basel : MDPI Publ., 2018-11-29) Elias, Mirette; Lohmann, Steffen; Auer, Sören
    OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems have been established to provide open educational resources that are accessible by anyone, including learners with special accessibility needs and preferences. We need to find a formal and interoperable way to describe these preferences in order to use them in OCW systems and retrieve relevant educational resources. This formal representation should use standard accessibility definitions of OCW that can be reused by other OCW systems to represent accessibility concepts. In this article, we present an ontology to represent the accessibility needs of learners with respect to the IMS AfA specifications. The ontology definitions together with rule-based queries are used to retrieve relevant educational resources. Related to this, we developed a user interface component that enables users to create accessibility profiles representing their individual needs and preferences based on our ontology. We evaluated the approach with five examples profiles.
  • Item
    Quality evaluation of open educational resources
    (Cham : Springer, 2020) Elias, Mirette; Oelen, Allard; Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Kismihok, Gábor; Auer, Sören; Alario-Hoyos, Carlos; Rodríguez-Triana, María Jesús; Scheffel, Maren; Arnedillo-Sánchez, Inmaculada; Dennerlein, Sebastian Maximilian
    Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and open-licensed educational materials widely used for learning. OER quality assessment has become essential to support learners and teachers in finding high-quality OERs, and to enable online learning repositories to improve their OERs. In this work, we establish a set of evaluation metrics that assess OER quality in OER authoring tools. These metrics provide guidance to OER content authors to create high-quality content. The metrics were implemented and evaluated within SlideWiki, a collaborative OpenCourseWare platform that provides educational materials in presentation slides format. To evaluate the relevance of the metrics, a questionnaire is conducted among OER expert users. The evaluation results indicate that the metrics address relevant quality aspects and can be used to determine the overall OER quality.
  • Item
    Metadata analysis of open educational resources
    (New York,NY,United States : Association for Computing Machinery, 2021) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Elias, Mirette; Kismihók, Gábor; Auer, Sören; Scheffel, Maren
    Open Educational Resources (OERs) are openly licensed educational materials that are widely used for learning. Nowadays, many online learning repositories provide millions of OERs. Therefore, it is exceedingly difficult for learners to find the most appropriate OER among these resources. Subsequently, the precise OER metadata is critical for providing high-quality services such as search and recommendation. Moreover, metadata facilitates the process of automatic OER quality control as the continuously increasing number of OERs makes manual quality control extremely difficult. This work uses the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis on OER metadata. Accordingly, this work proposes metadata-based scoring and prediction models to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on the results, our analysis demonstrated that OER metadata and OER content qualities are closely related, as we could detect high-quality OERs with an accuracy of 94.6%. Our model was also evaluated on 884 educational videos from Youtube to show its applicability on other educational repositories.