Abstract:

As a result of both the technological advancements in the fields of communications and the World Wide Web and also the special circumstances of the modern world, the number of online learning courses and people's engagement with them is steadily increasing. Navigating the vast landscape of offered courses to find a course based on the subject matter, level of knowledge and quality can often pose significant challenges to the end-user looking to acquire new knowledge. This becomes even more prevalent when focusing on specific fields of study such as Art and Cultural Heritage.

This study attempts to investigate the process of searching for online courses related to Art and Cultural Heritage for students of multiple knowledge levels and various demographics and the challenges that such an endeavor presents. For our research, we examine a variety of available search tools, such as the use of big-scale e-learning platforms that host multiple courses from multiple educators, the use of general-purpose search engines with a variety of different related keywords and of course, the use of a series of social media platforms. In addition, we are investigating the special challenges posed by the geographical limitations of Cultural Heritage studies.

Our analysis is based on observation and recording of various factors and it's incorporating the results of quantified information that we collected by utilizing the aforementioned tools. For instance, how many times, a relevant keyword appeared in the first page of a search engine and resulted in an online course.

We then proceed to suggest improvements to the online presence of such courses on the Web, both in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and in terms of Semantic Web usage techniques. Finally, we present a case for the development of new variations and the optimization of existing searching tools, for the discovery of online courses related not only to Art and Cultural Heritage, but also encompassing a variety of different specialized fields of study.

Keywords:

Art courses, search engines, cultural heritage education, e-learning platforms, metasearch.