The main goal of this research is to enhance the understanding of quality criteria for DB metadata for assessment and recognition as factors increasing their value in higher education (HE). To attain this goal, a case study approach centered in one HE institution was used, aiming (a) at an analysis of the "status quo" description of…

Knowledge elaboration plays a critical role in promoting knowledge acquisition and facilitating the retention of target knowledge in online collaborative discussions. Adopting a key-term-based automated analysis approach, we proposed an indicator framework to measure the level of knowledge elaboration in terms of coverage, activation, and…

Open educational resources (OER) are digitised material freely available to the students and self learners. Many institutions had initiated in incorporating these OERs in their higher educational system, to improve the quality of teaching and learning. These resources promote individualised study, collaborative learning. If they are coupled with…

Purpose: Research in the area of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve…

The authors examined articles published in the "Journal of Computing in Higher Education" between 2003 and 2012 with the purpose of determining the main themes of these articles, the types of research published, the major contributing authors, and the most-cited articles. An analysis was made of 129 original papers published by…

Reusable learning objects support packaging of educational materials allowing their discovery and reuse. Open educational resources emphasize the need for open licensing and promote sharing and community involvement. For both teachers and learners, finding appropriate tried and tested resources on a topic of interest and being able to incorporate…

The open educational resources (OER) movement has gained momentum in the past few years. With this new drive towards making knowledge open and accessible, a large number of OER repositories have been established and made available online throughout the world. However, the inability of existing search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to…

In various research areas, the availability of open datasets is considered as key for research and application purposes. These datasets are used as benchmarks to develop new algorithms and to compare them to other algorithms in given settings. Finding such available datasets for experimentation can be a challenging task in technology enhanced…

The creation of the first SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) object offers some challenges and difficulties which go beyond the facilities offered by content generation applications. In particular, the creation of really reusable, searchable learning objects requires a detailed consideration of metadata, where some institutional…

Virtual Globe software has become extremely popular both inside and outside of educational settings. This software allows users to explore the Earth in three dimensions while streaming satellite imagery, elevation, and other data from the Internet. Virtual Globes, such as Google Earth, NASA World Wind, and ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer can be effectively…

Game-based learning is becoming popular in the academic discussion of Learning Technologies. However, even though the educational potential of games has been thoroughly discussed in the literature, the integration of the games into educational processes and how to efficiently deliver the games to the students are still open questions. This paper…

The information overload in learning and teaching scenarios is a main hindering factor for efficient and effective learning. New methods are needed to help teachers and students in dealing with the vast amount of available information and learning material. Our approach aims to utilize contextualized attention metadata to capture behavioural…

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments…

There has been considerable emphasis on the availability and reuse of learning content in recent years. Since 2000, the ADL initiative has refined the recommendations contained in the SCORM documents through progressive stages represented in the SCORM 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 documents. Fundamental to SCORM is the notion of the Shareable Content…

Our claim is that semantic metadata are required to allow a real reusing and assembling of learning objects. Our system is based on three models used to describe the domain, learners, and learning objects. The learning object model is inspired from knowledge representation proposals. A learning object can be reused directly or can be combined with…