enhancing student access to university content through semantic technologies
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at the 3rd Conference on Effective Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the American University of Beirut.TRANSCRIPT
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ENHANCING STUDENT ACCESS TO UNIVERSITY CONTENT THROUGH SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES
Fouad Zablith
Olayan School of Business
American University of Beirut
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Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?
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Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?
What are the relevant learningMaterial to this course?
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Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?
What are the office hours of my instructor?
What are the relevant learningMaterial to this course?
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Registrar
Library
Student’sDepartment
Moodle
Communications
Student Services
Digital Repository
OnlineMedia
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Registrar
Library
Student’sDepartment
Moodle
Communications
Student Services
Digital Repository
OnlineMedia
?
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Problem• Big universities and organizations store their information
in different systems relevant to their departments
• Each system has its own platform, and grows with time to form an information silo, disconnected from other information repositories
• This will make it hard for students, the main consumers of university information, to get answers to their queries in an efficient way
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Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
From searching for “Terms”, to searchingfor “Things”
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Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
Learning on the fly with augmented reality
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Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
Learning physics while travelling around Europe+ explosion in online learning material
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Students’ Expectations are Changing• Today, students tend to expect more from technology, as it
is offering them more sophisticated tools
• They expect when they check their mobile phones, to know at a glance where their friends are at the moment
• They expect to know what happened in class from their moodle page, and ask questions through moodle
• They expect to go online to search for learning concepts they didn’t understand in class
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How can we, as a university, meet students’ expectations to enhance the discovery of our content?
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Proposed Solution• We propose a solution based on the following two main
components:
• A linked platform of university content• A processable and explicit student context
• The role of the two components is to enable the adaptation of university content to the students’ needs based on their contexts
• We propose relying on semantic technologies to provide the two components
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Requirements• To achieve our objective, we foresee the following
requirements:
• A methodology to extract and connect existing university information resources
• A set of tools to elicit the context of students in a processable manner
• Devise the appropriate means to adapt university content to the student needs in different channels
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Linking Resources• Linking is important, we have tutorials on that! Can we
make such links more explicit and reusable?
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Semantic Technologies and Linked Data
• Linking data within an organization enables breaking the isolation of data silos
• The semantic web and linked data provide the means to connect entities at the data level using meaningful relations and unique references
• Such entities are linked and published following well defined vocabularies, to make seamless exchange of data within the university and external resources
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Example
Jim
Student
Management 215
Course
enrolledIn
isa isa
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A Linked University Platform
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Linking Across the University
Course
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Linking Across the University
Course TitlehasTitle
Instructor
isToughtBy
Book
SlideshasMaterial
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Linking Across the University
Course TitlehasTitle
Instructor
isToughtBy
Department
isPartOf Book
Slides
hasISBN
ISBN
hasMaterial
hasSupplier
SupplierPublication
hasPublication
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Linking Across the University
Course TitlehasTitle
Instructor
isToughtBy
Department
isPartOf Book
Slides
hasISBN
ISBN
hasMaterial
hasSupplier
SupplierPublication
hasPublication
and beyond…
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“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”
Governments
Universities
References
Bibliography
And many more!
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Moving from Silos to Linked Data
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Linked Data Lucero Statistics
Entity Type Number of InstancesCourses 580Research Publications 16,000Video Podcasts 2,200Audio Podcasts 1,500Open Educational Resources 640YouTube Videos 900University Buildings 100Library Catalogue Books 12,000
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LibraryCatalogue
YouTube
Publications Podcasts
PeopleCourses
Information
Linked DataPlatform
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Linking Learning Material
Application that enablesstudents to discover various learning materialfrom the same page
Podcasts, open material and courses were neverconnected, but now they are!
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New Learning Channels
With the ease of access to information, creative things could be done with learning material.
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Student Context for Content Adaptation
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Potential Student Context Sources• Student contexts can potentially be aggregated from
different sources such as:
• Existing student records• Social networks• Manually updated profiles/preferences• Historical user context activities• Physical devices (e.g. location enabled mobile phones)
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Student Context Mockup
Jim
Student
MNGT 215
enrolledIn
Running
interestedIn
English 203
completed
Chess
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Student Assistant Mockup
Jim
Student
MNGT 215
enrolledIn
Running
interestedIn
English 203
completed
Chess
Book
Linked University Content
Hagop
Person Events
Run AUBRun
AUB
Office hours:OSB 456MWF: 3-4pm
OSB
MNGT 210
Program
Beirut Marathon11 Nov 2012
You have to take MNGT 210 next spring
New chess bookat AUB library
Student Context
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More Flexible Queries
Are there any Engineering related
events at AUB?
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More Flexible Queries
What are the cases related to Management 215?
Are there any Engineering related
events at AUB?
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What are the student job vacancies
available?
More Flexible Queries
What are the cases related to Management 215?
Are there any Engineering related
events at AUB?
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Challenges• Student contexts can contain private information, hence
students should have full control on what to expose
• Some information are harder to represent than others for example courses information vs degree requirements
• Another challenge is at the level of the student acceptance of such technology
• How to manage the increase in the context history to keep relevant information to the student
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Conclusion• Semantic technologies enable having a linked and
processable information layer in big organizations and universities
• A semantic student context was proposed to enable adapting university content to students’ preferences, and enhancing the discovery of new content
• Our next step is to start linking content at AUB, and evaluate the effect of the proposed context aware application on:• The efficiency in content discovery• The student learning experience
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Image Sources• http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-sense-of-place
-a-world-of-augmented-reality-part-2/13628/
• http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ph100/CourseRev/1
• http://openclipart.org/detail/79363