INTERACTIVE EDUCATIONAL CONTENTS DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK BASED ON LINKED OPEN DATA TECHNOLOGY

Introduction:
This paper introduces one of the activities of ICER (Innovation Center for Educational Resources) of Kyushu University Library, Japan. ICER was established in April, 2011 and its mission is to promote the higher education based on instructional design, the development of educational contents using recent ICT, the e-Learning by recording lectures, editing and releasing those videos as SPOC (Small Private Online Course) for the university or as MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for the public.

Research purpose:
Teachers have to prepare a lot of media data for the development of interactive educational contents because of the following reasons. Efficient education will be achieved with attractive educational contents that use the most recent ICT like 3D CG (Computer Graphics) because current students sometimes called video game generation are used to operate such contents. However, there is the problem that the development of such contents requires a lot of media data such as texts, images, audio and video data, 3D geometry data with their animation data. To make or collect those data, teachers have to spend much time. On the other hand, using LOD (Linked Open Data) technology, we would be able to collect such media data from the Internet in the world. Linked Data concept seems originally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Then, LOD means open data accessible by the Linked Data concept. Also, LOD can be realized by several primitive ideas and implementations such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), SPARQL (a query language for pattern matching against RDF graphs) and LDP (Linked Data Platform). The purpose of our research is to propose an interactive educational contents development framework based on linked open data technology.

Methodology:
There are some story-based contents to follow an instructional design. The framework should accept such story information. Indeed, the authors of this paper already developed and proposed such a development framework [1] and they have been modifying its functionalities to make it possible to collect various media data from the Internet in the world provided as openly accessible data by LOD technology. In the paper, the authors will describe its details.

Case studies:
As the case studies, the authors have been developing interactive educational contents with the proposed framework for learning certain events and ceremonies taken in the Imperial court, including ancient manners of the Emperor (Tennou) and Cabinet members as Japanese history study. To make these contents attractive for learners, the teachers had to use various types of media data. With the proposed framework, it would became very easy to develop the contents those are interactive Web-based contents that use the recent ICT like 3D CG.

Conclusion and Future work:
In the paper, the authors will propose the framework dedicated for the development of Web-based Interactive Educational Contents using LOD technology. The framework supports the most recent Web technologies, i.e., HTML5 and various JavaScript Libraries including WebGL. The preparation of Excel data that defines story-based state transitions of media data needed in an educational content is the all what teachers have to do when developing the content using the proposed framework. As future work, the authors will try to ask teachers to use the proposed framework for developing interactive Web-based educational contents.