TrAgLor: A LOM Based Digital Learning Objects Repository for Agriculture

TrAgLor: A LOM Based Digital Learning Objects

Repository for Agriculture

Zeynel Cebeci, Yoldaş Erdoğan, Murat Kara

Çukurova UniversityFaculty of Agriculture, Div. of Biometry & Genetics

01330 Adana, TURKEYcebeciz@gmail.com

The 4th International Scientific Conference, eLSE "eLearning and Software for Education", BUCHAREST, April 17-18, 2008

What is learning object?

- any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning (IEEE LTSC, 2002)

- any digital resource that can be reused to support learning (Wiley, 2000)

- can include anything that has pedagogical value - digital or no-digital such as a case study, a film… (Karman & Koohang, 2005)

Src: McGreal, R. (2004).

- any reusable digital resource that is encapsulated in a lesson or assemblage of lessons grouped in units, modules, courses, and even programs (McGreal,2004)

- digital resource in any size and format which can be online accessible and reusable in teaching and learning via online networked environments in order to achieve the desired learning outcomes or educational objectives (Nash, 2005)

What is learning object?

I am a learning object

Objects waterfall

- Medicine

- Biology

- Physical education

-…

learning object:- educational purpose, support learning, pedagogical structure- small, granular, reusable- interoperable- in building lessons, courses and curriculums

METAPHORS

- Atoms- Legos- Waterfalls

Learning Objects Repository = LOR

Learning Objects Repository = LOR Learning Resources Repository = LRRLearning Repository=LR

LORs are the catalogues of the e-learning era. They will be the fundamental first step in knowledge discovery and object exchange. They will provide the foundation for future learning and commerce (Richard et al, 2002)

In order to make LOs are accessible and exchangeable between learners and learning systems, there is a need for the systems that organize, index, search and deliver them.

Web-based systems, specialized for facilitating these tasks are generally called as learning object repositories

A typical food repository in Black Sea Region of Turkey

Accessing LOs… Google

Altavista

Lycos

Alltheweb

Yahoo

Excite

…

Search engines

Directories

Portals

“growing tomatoes”

-too many results

-HTML,HTML,HTML

-further check is required

- no learning purposes

Google: 153.000 results

?

LORs…Why?

• Difficulties in finding discipline specific resources• Difficulties in filtering resources found for a personal learning objective,• Lack of technical features and quality assurance of the resources,• Lack of educational value and properties of the resources,• Uncertainty in compliance criteria of the content for a specific learning purpose.

What does?

• Collection, presentation, and management of learning objects in a central repository which can globally be accessed on the Web,• Cost savings by avoiding repetitions in learning resources development,• Promoting high quality objects production and sharing,• Enabling learning resources exchange.

Who uses?

• LEARNERS • teachers, academic staff in f2f and distance education programmes• course authors, learning content developers

Agricultural Repositories

CGIAR CG-Online

EcoLearnIt, US

DELOR, Egypt

Wisconsin Online, US

MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org)CAREO (http://careo.natera.ca)Maricopa MLX Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx) ARIADNE (http://www.ariadne-en.org)BIOME (http://biome.ac.uk/)SMETE (www.smete.org)ESCOT (http://escot.org) And many more…

Most of these repositories are of general purpose and store the objects from many disciplines. In a study carried out by Tzikopoulos et al. (2005), 59 repositories were examined in different aspects. They reported that 3,200 of 881,000 learning resources are directly relevant to agriculture only. This evidently points out that there is a need for object repositories storing agricultural learning objects, and enabling easy access to these objects, where informal and lifelong learning need is too high like agriculture and food.

LORs…

- Discipline spesific (agricultur, food,…)- Multilingual (tr, en, de, …)- Multicultural (america, asia, europe…)- Standard (IEEE LOM)- Quality control (editorial review)- Open access

- Object + Metadata

tr

en

de

TrAgLor: Turkish Agricultural Learning Object Repository

System architecture

Object & Metadata Add – Simple

Object & Metadata Add – Classic

Object & Metadata Add – TreeView

Object & Metadata Add – Upload XML

Objects Search

Google-like simple search

adva

nced

sea

rch

Search by lom fields Search in files (fulltext search)

powerful search engine

Object Listing

Object Summary View

LOM Metadata View in Tabular Form

LOM Metadata View in XML

Object Directory Browsing

Türkiye Tarımsal Öğrenme Nesneleri Deposu

Conclusions

• Random image banners in every page gives image-based information to the learners,• Customizable view styles for users (will be available in beta 2.0), • A very advanced search mechanism,• Multilingual user interfaces (Turkish, English, and German currently),• Multilingual and multicultural learning content,• Light portal system, News and events content,• Different view styles of metadata (tabular-, xml- and web-views) • Tree view metadata entry to easily build LOM structured elements,• Full LOM compatibility for interoperability between the systems,• Learning objects which are specific to agriculture, food, veterinary, forestry and environmental sciences

Content and access statistics for TrAgLor (as of 10th April, 2008 since 8th Aug 2007)

active visitors: 24 (10.4.2008, 11:00)today visitors: 278 (10.4.2008, 11:00)visitors for this month: 8,720 (10.4.2008, 10 days)Total visitors since Aug'07: 153,026

Items StatsTotal number of metadata 423Total view of objects 32929Average view of objects 77Total view of metadata 13525Average view of metadata 37Number of TrAgLor objects 153Total view of TrAgLor objects 14880Average view of TrAgLor objects 97

This project has been supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK, Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırmalar Kurumu)

Thank you for your attention!

We will be at:

http://traglor.cukurova.edu.trhttp://turkonde.cukurova.edu.tr

for your:

contributions,submissions,cooperations and partnership.