Video-based learning offers a learner a self-paced, lucid, memorizable, and a flexible way of learning. The availability of abundant educational video materials on the web has certainly abetted an individual's learning means. But the lack of necessary information about the videos makes it difficult for the learner to search and select the exact…

e-Learning industry is rapidly changing and the current learning trends are based on personalized, social and mobile learning, content reusability, cloud-based and talent management. The learning systems have attained a significant growth catering to the needs of a wide range of learners, having different approaches and styles of learning. Objects…

Many of the challenges currently facing lectures are symptoms of problems with learning content creation, development and presentation. Learning Factory solves these problems by integrating critical innovations that have been proven over the last ten to twenty years in different industrial areas, but have not yet been brought or ported together in…

Learning has transcended into a life-long endeavor in the information age. It is no longer restricted to confines of formal classrooms. Consequently, a student is not restricted to traditional learning resources like teachers, textbooks or printed content. Digital resources available on the Internet form a very significant component of…

Electronic learning objects (LOs) are commonly conceived of as digital units of information used for teaching and learning. To facilitate their classification for pedagogical planning and retrieval purposes, LOs are complemented with metadata (e.g., the author). These metadata are usually restricted by a set of predetermined tags to which the…

The most important dimension of learning is the content, and a Learning Management System (LMS) suffices this to a certain extent. The present day LMS are designed to primarily address issues like ease of use, search, content and performance. Many surveys had been conducted to identify the essential features required for the improvement of LMS,…

The paper describes component-based approach (CBA) for learning management system development. Learning object as components of e-learning courses and their metadata is considered. The architecture of learning management system based on CBA being developed in Riga Technical University, namely its architecture, elements and possibilities are…

Purpose: This paper aims to present and evaluate a web-based tool, namely ASK-CDM-ECTS, which facilitates authoring and publishing on the web descriptions of (open) academic courses in machine-readable format using an application profile of the Course Description Metadata (CDM) specification, namely CDM-ECTS. Design/methodology/approach: The paper…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") focuses on current and emerging topics that are strategically important to research libraries. The articles explore issues, share information, pose critical questions, and provide examples. This issue includes the following articles: (1) Special at the Core: Aligning, Integrating, and…

The success of communities generally implies both growth of the participants (and thus of their contributions), and an increasing array of services offered. For this reason, it is often difficult for new users to fully understand the potential of the community, while for expert users it becomes difficult both to manage the resources available in…

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

With vigorous development of the Internet, especially the web page interaction technology, distant E-learning has become more and more realistic and popular. Digital courses may consist of many learning units or learning objects and, currently, many learning objects are created according to SCORM standard. It can be seen that, in the near future,…

In modern learning environments, the lecturer or educational designer is often confronted with multi-national student cohorts, requiring special consideration regarding language, cultural norms and taboos, religion, and ethics. Through a somewhat provocative example we demonstrate that taking such factors into account can be essential to avoid…

This paper presents an ontology-based framework aimed at explicit representation of context-specific metadata derived from the actual usage of learning objects and learning designs. The core part of the proposed framework is a learning object context ontology, that leverages a range of other kinds of learning ontologies (e.g., user modeling…

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…