OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE LINKED DATA WEB
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE LINKED DATA WEB

Summary/Abstract: There is a significant growth in the number and quality of Open Educational Resources that are published online. These resources are published both in an education-specific context, in open educational repositories, specifically built for storing educational material, and in a generic context, for other purposes, but having a relevance to teaching and learning. The current map of OER repositories shows a heterogeneous landscape, due to various tools, methods and standards used for publishing the educational content. Significant effort has been made in promoting standards such as SCORM and IEEE LOM, to facilitate reusability of educational resources. However, the current amount of Open Educational Resources lacks integration and interoperability. To address these issues, the Linked Data principles can be used to discover, integrate and reuse educational content published online. Linked Data has been proven to foster web interoperability at a general level, by providing now widely used principles and standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. Steps for publishing Open Educational Resources as Linked Data include: selection of data sources, modelling the data through the use of vocabularies and ontologies, conversion to the RDF data model, including cleaning of the data, publishing the semantic-enriched data to Linked OER Repositories and consuming the data, usually through SPARQL endpoints. As a result of this process, a significant number of educational datasets are currently published as Linked Data by universities, government institutions, publications and specific projects in this area. This paper presents a literature review of the current efforts toward publishing of Open Educational Resources as Linked Data. It also highlights some research challenges and suggests suitable approaches to overcome these challenges.

• Details
• Contents