Abstract:
Closed campuses, working remotely, and physical distancing have changed the way we work, teach, learn, shop, attend conferences, and interact with family and friends. But the Covid-19 pandemic has not changed what we know about creating high-end online education. Two decades of research has shown that online education often fails to fulfill its promise, and the emergency shift to remote instruction has, for many, justified their distrust and dislike of online learning. Low interactivity remains a widely recognized short-coming of current online offerings. Low interactivity results, in part, from many faculty not feeling comfortable being themselves online. The long-advocated for era of authentic assessments is needed now more than ever. Finally, greater support is needed for both underrepresented students and for faculty to move beyond basic online instruction to create a strong continuum of care between the teaching and learning environment and the student support infrastructure. For those who have been long-term champions of online education, it has never been more important to confront the three biggest challenges that continue to haunt online education – interactivity, authenticity, and support. Only by confronting these challenges squarely can instructors, educational developers, and their institutions take huge steps towards better online instruction in the midst of a pandemic and make widespread, high-quality online education permanently part of the “new normal.”
In this report, we introduce a recent development in the area of Web technologies which has the potential to revolutionise the area of ODL: The Semantic Web. While the Semantic Web has been, until now mostly considered from a research perspective, we focus here on the concrete benefit that can today be obtained from applying the set of principles and technologies that have emerged from the most pragmatic part of the Semantic Web field: Linked Data.
Linked Data relies on the simple idea that the mechanisms used nowadays to share and interlink documents on the Web can be applied to share and interlink data and metadata about these documents, as well as the concepts and entities they relate to. On the Web of Linked Data, every “data object” (representing for example a person, a place or a topic) is identified by a Web address, and characterised using Web links that can connect to representations of other data objects, identified by other Web addresses, thus using the Web as a giant data graph that openly draws from any contributing source.
In this report we describe how this idea is being realised and how it can be adopted by organisations willing to contribute, interlink to and take advantage of the Web of Linked Data for ODL. We describe the tools, technologies and processes to publish and use Linked Data in a concrete way, focusing in particular on learning and teaching applications. Understanding both the costs and benefits of adopting Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies is, of course, a critical part of the process. Alongside the description and explanation of the technological notions related to this area we show how such notions can be applied to solve some of the specific problems faced in ODL and present a number of case studies in which such benefits have been concretely achieved.
Some interesting data.
could be key