2020, Elias, Mirette, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Lohmann, Steffen, Kismihok, Gabor, Auer, Sören, Gurreiro, Tiago, Nicolau, Hugo, Moffatt, Karyn

Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs.

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.

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.