USING LEARNING OBJECTS TO CREATE SEMANTICALLY ENRICHED CONTENT TO SHARE KNOWLEDGE AND CREATE COMMUNITIES IN E-LEARNING SYSTEMS

ICTs in education have given the opportunity to create a wide range of solutions to ease the process of teaching-learning. The most important achievement is that of e-learning systems. One of the central issues of e-learning is the creation and sharing of educative content that is stored in repositories. The content can be created from scratch or reusing other content elements (totally or partially). Such educative contents are named as learning objects. The objective of the present work is to create a way to add meta-content to enable sharing (of knowledge) and participation (let an user that is visiting a content be able to contact with others that already visited it and that were considered by the faculty as an expert). It is needed a fast and efficient way to describe the content to be able to share it. And develop a methodology to create easy to share content (created by teachers or by experienced and supervised students) that can add interesting perspective to the content. The way to do this is through metadata [1] also known as LOM. This standard defines how to create the metadata.
In this paper we have extended the metadata to allow extended participation (evaluations, comments,…) and to build networks of experts for each piece of content, enriching it. When a piece of content is created (from scratch or from other learning objects) a mathematical relationship is added to its metadata following an algorithm described in the methodology. This metadata allows to share the same content within the courses that are using it, and creating a network of learners enrolled in those courses, with that content in common.
The methodology also proves to retrieve the content very fast from the courses where the learner is enrolled. Creates a valuable network of outstanding co-learners and can even recommend courses of potential interest to a certain learner building the recommendation on the basis that the courses sharing content with the courses in which the user is already enrolled, might be of insterest.

References:
[1] IEEE 1484.12.1-2002 Standard for Information Technology –Education and Training Systems– Learning Objects and Metadata