ENHANCING STUDENT ACCESS TO UNIVERSITY CONTENT THROUGH SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES

Fouad Zablith

Olayan School of Business

American University of Beirut

Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?

Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?

What are the relevant learningMaterial to this course?

Information is Scattered & GrowingWhat are the courses offeredIn Decision Systems this spring?

What are the office hours of my instructor?

What are the relevant learningMaterial to this course?

Registrar

Library

Student’sDepartment

Moodle

Communications

Student Services

Digital Repository

OnlineMedia

Registrar

Library

Student’sDepartment

Moodle

Communications

Student Services

Digital Repository

OnlineMedia

?

Problem• Big universities and organizations store their information

in different systems relevant to their departments

• Each system has its own platform, and grows with time to form an information silo, disconnected from other information repositories

• This will make it hard for students, the main consumers of university information, to get answers to their queries in an efficient way

Technology is Getting More Sophisticated

From searching for “Terms”, to searchingfor “Things”

Technology is Getting More Sophisticated

Learning on the fly with augmented reality

Technology is Getting More Sophisticated

Learning physics while travelling around Europe+ explosion in online learning material

Students’ Expectations are Changing• Today, students tend to expect more from technology, as it

is offering them more sophisticated tools

• They expect when they check their mobile phones, to know at a glance where their friends are at the moment

• They expect to know what happened in class from their moodle page, and ask questions through moodle

• They expect to go online to search for learning concepts they didn’t understand in class

How can we, as a university, meet students’ expectations to enhance the discovery of our content?

Proposed Solution• We propose a solution based on the following two main

components:

• A linked platform of university content• A processable and explicit student context

• The role of the two components is to enable the adaptation of university content to the students’ needs based on their contexts

• We propose relying on semantic technologies to provide the two components

Requirements• To achieve our objective, we foresee the following

requirements:

• A methodology to extract and connect existing university information resources

• A set of tools to elicit the context of students in a processable manner

• Devise the appropriate means to adapt university content to the student needs in different channels

Linking Resources• Linking is important, we have tutorials on that! Can we

make such links more explicit and reusable?

Semantic Technologies and Linked Data

• Linking data within an organization enables breaking the isolation of data silos

• The semantic web and linked data provide the means to connect entities at the data level using meaningful relations and unique references

• Such entities are linked and published following well defined vocabularies, to make seamless exchange of data within the university and external resources

Example

Jim

Student

Management 215

Course

enrolledIn

isa isa

A Linked University Platform

Linking Across the University

Course

Linking Across the University

Course TitlehasTitle

Instructor

isToughtBy

Book

SlideshasMaterial

Linking Across the University

Course TitlehasTitle

Instructor

isToughtBy

Department

isPartOf Book

Slides

hasISBN

ISBN

hasMaterial

hasSupplier

SupplierPublication

hasPublication

Linking Across the University

Course TitlehasTitle

Instructor

isToughtBy

Department

isPartOf Book

Slides

hasISBN

ISBN

hasMaterial

hasSupplier

SupplierPublication

hasPublication

and beyond…

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

Governments

Universities

References

Bibliography

And many more!

Moving from Silos to Linked Data

Linked Data Lucero Statistics

Entity Type Number of InstancesCourses 580Research Publications 16,000Video Podcasts 2,200Audio Podcasts 1,500Open Educational Resources 640YouTube Videos 900University Buildings 100Library Catalogue Books 12,000

LibraryCatalogue

YouTube

Publications Podcasts

PeopleCourses

Information

Linked DataPlatform

Linking Learning Material

Application that enablesstudents to discover various learning materialfrom the same page

Podcasts, open material and courses were neverconnected, but now they are!

New Learning Channels

With the ease of access to information, creative things could be done with learning material.

Student Context for Content Adaptation

Potential Student Context Sources• Student contexts can potentially be aggregated from

different sources such as:

• Existing student records• Social networks• Manually updated profiles/preferences• Historical user context activities• Physical devices (e.g. location enabled mobile phones)

Student Context Mockup

Jim

Student

MNGT 215

enrolledIn

Running

interestedIn

English 203

completed

Chess

Student Assistant Mockup

Jim

Student

MNGT 215

enrolledIn

Running

interestedIn

English 203

completed

Chess

Book

Linked University Content

Hagop

Person Events

Run AUBRun

AUB

Office hours:OSB 456MWF: 3-4pm

OSB

MNGT 210

Program

Beirut Marathon11 Nov 2012

You have to take MNGT 210 next spring

New chess bookat AUB library

Student Context

More Flexible Queries

Are there any Engineering related

events at AUB?

More Flexible Queries

What are the cases related to Management 215?

Are there any Engineering related

events at AUB?

What are the student job vacancies

available?

More Flexible Queries

What are the cases related to Management 215?

Are there any Engineering related

events at AUB?

Challenges• Student contexts can contain private information, hence

students should have full control on what to expose

• Some information are harder to represent than others for example courses information vs degree requirements

• Another challenge is at the level of the student acceptance of such technology

• How to manage the increase in the context history to keep relevant information to the student

Conclusion• Semantic technologies enable having a linked and

processable information layer in big organizations and universities

• A semantic student context was proposed to enable adapting university content to students’ preferences, and enhancing the discovery of new content

• Our next step is to start linking content at AUB, and evaluate the effect of the proposed context aware application on:• The efficiency in content discovery• The student learning experience

Thank you

http://fouad.zablith.orgfouad.zablith@aub.edu.lb

@fzablith

Image Sources• http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-sense-of-place

-a-world-of-augmented-reality-part-2/13628/

• http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ph100/CourseRev/1

• http://openclipart.org/detail/79363