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)

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

Why LORs? a typical example Google

Altavista

Lycos

Alltheweb

Yahoo

Excite

…

Search engines

Directories

Portals

“growing tomatoes”

-too many results

-HTML,HTML,HTML

-no learning purposes

- no educational properties

- no review for quality assurance

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

FAO Capacity Building PortalCGIAR CG-Online EcoLearnIt, USRural-eGov Observatory, Greece Wisconsin Online, US

…

General Purpose Repositories

MERLOTCAREOMaricopa MLX Learning Exchange ARIADNEBIOMESMETEESCOTand 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…

- Domain spesific (agriculture, food,…)- Multilingual (tr, en, de, …)- Multicultural (arid, humid, tropical…)- An implementation of IEEE LOM- Editorial Quality control system- Object + Metadata - Open access LOR

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)

search engine

Object Listing

Object Summary View

LOM Metadata View in Tabular Form

LOM Metadata View in XML

Object Directory Browsing

Object Categories View (AGRICOLA)

Conclusions -- As banner random image push with descriptive tip texts at the top of each page in every access.

-- Alternative search, browse and listing options (i.e. simple, advanced, LOM elements, full text).

-- Various view styles (tabular view, list view, and xml view) to display metadata.

-- Tree view editing of metadata to enable users to build metadata in hierarchical way, rapidly.

-- Multilingual user interfaces, vocabularies and classification categories that easies objects contributions and sharing by a wide community of users.

-- Light portal subsystem providing headlines of daily news and track of events.

Conclusions _ TrAgLor LOM AP?

General:TitleGeneral:KeywordGeneral:DescriptionGeneral:LanguageTechnical:Location*Technical:Location of screenshot/logo of objectTechnical:FormatTechnical:Requirement*Technical:Source code availabilityEducational:ContextEducational:Typical Age Range*Educational:Primary Audience GroupEducational:Intended End User RoleLifecycle:Contribute RoleLifecycle:Contribute EntityLifecycle:Contribute DateLifecycle:VersionLifecycle:StatusRights:CostRights:Copyright and other restrictionsRights:Description Meta-Metadata:Contribute.RoleMeta-Metadata:Contribute.EntityMeta-Metadata:Contribute.DateMeta-Metadata:Metadata SchemaMeta-Metadata:LanguageClassification:PurposeClassification:Taxon Path. SourceClassification:Taxon Path.Taxon.IDClassification:Taxon Path.Taxon.Entry

- TrAgLor uses 28 of IEEE LOM elements as mandatory elements

- Generating all LOM elements for any object is possible with alternative metadata editing tools of TrAgLor

- Even optional elements are left as unfilled during entry process of metadata, all LOM elements are created as empty fields in its associated XML file which is stored in LOM spaces of the repository.

-Although the use of all elements of IEEE LOM schema is optional, we consult this practice for ensuring immediate interoperability with other application profiles based on IEEE LOM.

-Our implementation is not actually based on a specially named application profile yet because we will document it in future works.

- TrAgLor uses 28 of IEEE LOM elements as mandatory elements

- Generating all LOM elements for any object is possible with alternative metadata editing tools of TrAgLor

- Even optional elements are left as unfilled during entry process of metadata, all LOM elements are created as empty fields in its associated XML file which is stored in LOM spaces of the repository.

-Although the use of all elements of IEEE LOM schema is optional, we consult this practice for ensuring immediate interoperability with other application profiles based on IEEE LOM.

-Our implementation is not actually based on a specially named application profile yet because we will document it in future works.

Content and access statistics for TrAgLor (as of 15th Sep, 2008 since 8th Aug 2007)

active visitors: 76 (15.9.2008, 14:30)daily visitors: 1510 (15.9.2008, 14:30)visitors for Sep09: 33411 (15.9.2008, 15 days)Total visitors since Aug'07: 422556

Items StatsTotal number of metadata 549Total view of objects 93975Average view of objects 171Total view of metadata 29740Average view of metadata 61Number of TrAgLor objects 228Total view of TrAgLor objects 47627Average view of TrAgLor objects 208

TrAgLor objects are mainly pictures, maps, text and presentations at the present time because our principal aim was to provide a repository system and sample objects but not to develop objects for a special curriculum.

TrAgLor objects are mainly pictures, maps, text and presentations at the present time because our principal aim was to provide a repository system and sample objects but not to develop objects for a special curriculum.

Problems

In a several demonstration series for the repository which have been organized locally, majority of the participants provided some important preliminary evidences that LORs like TrAgLor can serve improved learning outcomes to both students and teachers although they have been reluctant to feed the repository due to following reasons:

- Complexity of metadata tagging process,- Unpreparedness of academic staff regarding LO concepts and/or design,- Unwillingness of teaching staff for sharing their personal objects with others.

Future Works

In addition to the efforts to find sustainability support we planned to carry out following topics in the forthcoming versions of TrAgLor:- Developing online authoring tools to easily create LOs,- Building some application practices to demonstrate the use and sharing LOs,- Developing a DRM system to manage digital rights and fee based usages,- Developing and documenting an official application profile and,- Developing OAI-PMH based metadata provider and harvesting services

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!

URL:

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

for your contributions, cooperations and partnership.