Use of Web of Data to support contextualized learning in Smart Learning Environments
Smart Learning Environments (SLEs) provide students with educational resources and learning activities that fit their individual context in an efficient, effective and attractive way. In current SLE proposals, the educator is responsible for providing the educational resources, defining the learning activities and specifying the conditions in which they will be offered to the students. Learning paths can thus be personalized depending on the context, which is a very valuable feature for student’s learning. However, this also imposes a significant workload for educators, which in turn seriously limits the amount and variety of resources and activities that are offered in SLEs, as well as the degree of personalization that is provided. This project proposes a new SLE called CASSSUALearn for the support of both formal and informal learning that may take place in multiple spaces, especially in the web space and the physical space augmented by the Internet of Things. Open vocabularies available in the Web of Data will be employed in this SLE in order semantically annotate learning designs and contexts. This will enable CASSSUALearn to leverage the open databases of the Web of Data in order to automatically generate contextualized resources and activities as well as recommendations with a high degree of personalization. The project’s output will include an architecture and a prototype of the proposed system. Moreover, CASSUALearn will be evaluated both from a technological and education point of view in several experiences involving real users.
This research project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Regional Council of Education of Castile and Leon under grant VA257P18 (“Uso de la Web de Datos para apoyar el aprendizaje contextualizado en Entornos Inteligentes de Aprendizaje”).