Examining Learning Object Repositories from a Knowledge Management Perspective

Over the past years, a number of international initiatives that recognize the importance of sharing and reusing digital educational resources among educational communities through the use of Learning Object Repositories (LORs) have emerged. Typically, these initiatives focus on collecting digital educational resources that are offered by their creators for open access and potential reuse. Nevertheless, most of the existing LORs are designed more as digital repositories, rather than as Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). By exploiting KMSs functionalities in LORs would bare the potential to support the organization and sharing of educational communities’ explicit knowledge (depicted in digital educational resources constructed by teachers and/or instructional designers) and tacit knowledge (depicted in teachers’ and students’ experiences and interactions of using digital educational resources available in LORs). Within this context, in this paper we study the design and the implementation of fourteen operating LORs from the KMSs’ perspective, so as to identify additional functionalities that can support the management of educational communities’ explicit and tacit knowledge. Thus, we propose a list of essential LORs’ functionalities, which aim to facilitate the organization and sharing of educational communities’ knowledge. Finally, we present the added value of these functionalities by identifying their importance towards addressing the current demands of web-facilitated educational communities, as well as the knowledge management activities that they execute.

It has been argued that the reuse of educational resources will contribute to the development of economies of scale in which users, both learners and teachers, can create, source, and share knowledge and information. Central to this objective are Learning Object Repositories (LORs) that can support resource reuse within and across learning communities. The uptake and use of LORs by communities will be influenced by a number of sociocultural factors that are difficult to distinguish and solve, since they involve a number of interrelated, tacit variables. In this article, we discuss three case studies outlining a range of actual and potential cultural issues affecting the implementation of LORs. We present a framework that can support systematic identification of these issues in the design and development stage and guide future implementations.

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to identify factors that motivate or impede faculty use of learning object repositories (LORs). The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) served as the theoretical framework for this study. Design/methodology/approach – The study used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore two research questions relating to factors affecting faculty use of LORs. Research subjects were faculty users in two- or four-year colleges or universities from two LORs: Orange Grove and Wisconsin Online Resource Center (Wisc-Online). Two phases of the study were conducted. Phase I of the study collected data by semi-structured interviews, and data were analyzed by a content analysis method. Based on the results of Phase I, Phase II collected data by a survey instrument, and data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and analysis of variance. Findings – The study identified 22 factors as motivators for faculty use of LORs and 13 factors as barriers for faculty use of LORs. Research limitations/implications – The research policies of Orange Grove and Wisc-Online limited the selection of study participants. Lack of a random sample and a small sample size limited the generalizability of the results and findings of the study. However, as an exploratory research, the results and findings of the study are still valuable for LOR builders and managers to get a better understanding of factors affecting faculty use of LORs, and to develop strategies to recruit more faculty members to use LORs. Practical implications – The findings and results of the study can inform designers and managers of LORs about what positively or negatively influences faculty use of LORs, and serve as a basis to develop strategies to recruit faculty members to use LORs. Originality/value – First, this study identified the factors that motivate or impede faculty use of LORs from actual faculty users’ perspectives, so these factors more accurately reflect LORs’ values to faculty in teaching and course design and the barriers for faculty use of LORs in a practical environment. Second, this study is among the first known to explore these factors using UTAUT as the theoretical framework, and the results of the study also validate UTAUT in the context of faculty use of LORs.

We present an approach for the personalized access and the students’ coauthoring in repositories of Learning Objects (LOs). The personalized access combines content-based and collaborative filtering mechanisms. Students’ coauthoring includes the incorporation of assessments of the existing LOs and new LOs which are peer reviewed.

PurposePublic crisis often generates new knowledge that should be incorporated into a government’s macro-control to ensure the relief supply. From the perspective of public crisis knowledge management, the Chinese system of Government relief supplies can be considered as a special case of the knowledge system. This paper aims to investigate the supply and production mechanism of relief goods and explore the advantages of the Chinese system when a sudden public crisis occurs.Design/methodology/approachUnder the Chinese system, the authors construct a relief supply chain model consisting of the Chinese Government, one manufacturer and one supplier, where the supplier has no capital constraints. Given the demand for relief goods, the government purchases from the manufacturer with a guide price. Then, the manufacturer decides on its order quantity and offers a wholesale price to the supplier. The supplier has a random capacity and decides on the level of knowledge acquisition to improve its capacity.FindingsThe authors first obtain the analytical solution for the manufacturer to motivate a high level of knowledge acquisition from the supplier. Specifically, the manufacturer’s optimal order quantity is equal to the demand and the optimal wholesale price has a cost-plus form that reimburses the supplier for its production cost and knowledge-acquisition cost. Next, the authors derive the optimal guide price for the government, which should be set to subsidize the manufacturer with a proportion of the sourcing cost. Finally, the authors compare the Chinese system with the market mechanism where the supplier has capital constraints and confirm that the Chinese system is more beneficial to both the manufacturer and the government.Originality/valueQuantitative research on the Chinese system of Government relief supplies is difficult to be conducted. This paper provides feasible and practical methods to quantify the benefits of the Chinese system. The results reveal that the Chinese system is an effective mechanism of public crisis knowledge management, which can be helpful to the government’s policy-making in practice.

ABSTRACTVirtual learning in engineering education uses e‐learning resources in many different ways. These resources are normally stored in learning object repositories (LOR) where they are catalogued with metadata facilitating retrieval by end users. As ranking e‐learning resources according to quality criteria is considered helpful for end users, quality measures play a prominent role. This article presents a study for estimating the quality of learning objects (LO) by using the available data in MERLOT, a large LOR. The main result of this study is the identification, definition, and evaluation of quality metrics applicable to engineering e‐learning resources which can be adapted to other types of repositories for facilitating the search of e‐resources in general. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:477–488, 2015; View this article online atwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI10.1002/cae.21619

The participation of experts and other external contributors is a common requirement in the design of educational scenarios for the school of the future. We can find many repositories of learning objects, but it is not so common to find directories containing people who are willing to participate in an educational activity. Much less common is to find information about these people to determine their suitability from an educational perspective. This paper describes a proposal for the automatic enrichment of existing information in a directory of contributors to educational activities. Through this enrichment process, it is possible to enhance the amount of information available to a recommender system to identify the most appropriate people to participate in a particular activity, and reduces the need for human intervention when selecting individuals to contribute to educational activities.

This work outlines the design process of a user centered learning object repository. A repository should foster the development and acquisition of both generic and specific informational competencies. The results of the first stage of the user centered design process are presented which provide a clear understanding of user and task requirements and the context of use. A user study was conducted using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. A qualitative approach was performed through the content analysis of 24 in-depth interviews achieved through a random stratified sampling method. Regarding the quantitative approach, more than 5 million student navigation sessions were processed in order to know the real information behavior accomplished in the virtual campus and more specifically all the services and resources used and the search actions carried out by users. Our aim is to achieve a thorough informational behavior analysis that involves access, treatment, integration, evaluation, creation and communication of information for learning purposes which will be useful for integrating learning object repositories in virtual learning environments.KeywordsLearning Object Repository (LOR)user centered designlog analysiscontent analysise-learninginformation-related competencies

With the rapid development of network technology, online sharing of teaching resources has gained widespread attention in the educational field. This sharing not only provides educators and learners with rich learning resources but also opens up new channels for knowledge innovation and dissemination. However, it remains a major challenge to efficiently manage, allocate, and evaluate these resources. Existing research methods often rely too heavily on traditional knowledge management theories and overlook the characteristics of online environments. This research aimed to study and propose a new online sharing mechanism for teaching resources from the perspective of knowledge management. This study provided a new theoretical framework and practical strategy for online sharing of teaching resources by completing the knowledge management system based on the TransCat model, introducing the online sharing algorithm of Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), and using the resource effectiveness evaluation considering knowledge potential differences.

The increasing demand for World Wide Web (Web) based courses has imposed some challenges in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) field, in particular when considering the education supported by the Web. One of the emerging needs of education supported by the Web is related to the Learning Objects (LO) usage inside Learning Management Systems (LMS). Besides production of "good quality" LO, it must be provided efficient methods concerning their storage and dissemination. However, some difficulties have been reported by teachers of Web based courses: "expensive costs" for LO authoring; lack of tools for sharing these materials; and negative practical experiences for reusing them in an LMS. Some proposals to mitigate these problems have been the development of Learning Object Repository (LOR) tools, mainly in order to facilitate the dissemination of LO. Despite the progress already achieved, there are still several barriers for their adoption by teachers such as lack of easy integration between LMS environment and LOR. In general, current integrations are not simple for typical users. In this context, the target of this project is to presents an innovative LOR, the Interactive Repository of Digital Contents -iRepository. Its model provides seamless integration with a particular LMS and offers several resources to help teaching and learning processes, such as registry of LO educational effectiveness. As a practical contribution, the fundamentals of iRepository model were implemented for an specific LMS, the Moodle system.

Learning Objects (LOs) have emerged as a cornerstone approach for the development and distribution of educational content. These resources are distributed by Learning Object Repositories (LORs), which can make it easier for users to find suitable LOs by using Recommender Systems (RSs). This paper presents a hybrid recommendation model for LORs that combines content-based, demographic and context-aware techniques, along with the use of quality and popularity metrics. This article also describes how the model has been used to implement two RSs for two real LORs: ViSH and Europeana. Each of these RSs was evaluated in terms of accuracy, utility,usability and satisfaction perceived by end users. Besides, an A/B testing was performed in ViSH to compare the recommendations of the RS with random suggestions. The results showed that the RSs had a high user acceptance in terms of utility, usability and satisfaction, and that the RSs significantly exceeded the performance achieved by the random recommendations.

Academic research in Knowledge and knowledge management tends to focus on issues related to producing, storing, organizing, sharing, and retrieving data, information, and knowledge for and from humans, and on how to make use of machines for those and other related purposes. Therefore, hardware and software are usually seen more as support and means but, as technology exponentially evolves, there are already many machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other resources where it is hard for a human mind to fully comprehend the rationale behind its outcomes, results, predictions, processing, or decisions taken, even though they might be shown to be precise and of high quality. There are theoretical e technical efforts to address it, such as the concept of Explainable AI, but it is conceivable that knowledge from machines may not be, in the present or in the future, both efficient and adequately translatable to traditional human-comprehensive knowledge. That knowledge might one day be only usable by other machines in a yet unknown approach of knowledge sharing between them, in a specific way designed for them and perhaps, in the future, also by them: a machine perspective of knowledge and knowledge management. In addition, machine knowledge may not be available only in the explicit form but also in a manner somehow analog to human tacit knowledge, as for instance, a given AI may acquire a rationale that is beyond what its stored bytes can express. That might be also evidence of a context in which perhaps it may be only able to be socialized between machines, in a tacit to tacit “transfer”, not with nor for humans. Furthermore, keeping machine knowledge secure might be far more complex than mere data storage security and policy, as a simple copy of those data may be insufficient for representing and recovering a previously developed machine knowledge, implying that traditional information management is no longer enough. Much is still needed to advance on the topic of machine knowledge, as an approach to data, information, and knowledge from and for machines is needed, in what could be called machine knowledge management (MKM). But that is not the final step needed, as from these machine knowledge and knowledge management concepts emerge the need for a unified theory with human counterparts, that addresses the complex aspects of coexistence and interactions of both clusters of knowledge, with implications for Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT), and how both can work together in the present and future challenges. Therefore, the aim of this research is to advance toward the proposal of a theoretical model for machine knowledge and knowledge management, on how that can be integrated with the analog human versions in a unified human-machine model, and what might play the mediator role. Subsidiarily, it also discusses the need for a standardized and expanded concept of information and knowledge consistent with that model. Finally, topics are proposed for future research agenda. To achieve these research goals, the main methodologies adopted were the literature review and the grounded theory.

Abstract—Knowledge management is supported by many strategies such as business intelligence, collaboration, document management and e-learning. With the development of modern information technology and the increases of demand for building and maintaining dynamic capabilities, E-learning has played more and more important role of all the technologies in the supporting knowledge management. A successful e-learning system is supported by many critical success factors and technology has become the key factor among these factors. Consequently, the review of basic technologies and corresponding products that support e-learning will be in favor of further study on e-learning. From perspective of knowledge management, this paper makes a review about the relationship between e-learning and knowledge management and advanced technologies and corresponding products that support the design and operation of e-learning system. At the end of this paper, we analyze the main trends of the development direction of e-learning technology.

This project shows the implementation of a portable repository for Ardora project-based learning objects, which was designed for schools without an Internet connection. The proposal was evaluated by 16 teachers in Apurimac-Peru. First, teachers were trained in the use of Ardora software, then they created learning objects using Ardora according to the course they teach at school; then they published the learning objects in the portable repository. The focus group methodology was used to obtain the opinion of the teachers, the results show that they agree that the portable repository can be used for the design and storage of learning objects. On the other hand, load tests were performed on the Raspberry Pi server, and the portable repository could have 200 requests with 10 users concurrently.

E-learning courses has been adopted by universities as an alternative teaching method. By development of computer based devices and new methods of teaching, e-learning courses have emerged. However, the synergies, functional effectiveness and integration of knowledge management within an e-learning course have attracted little interest for serious research. In this paper, we discuss designing an e-learning course in C language on a knowledge management perspective. Constitutive elements of designing e-learning course in C language are analyzed. The course is supported by the virtual learning environment which integrates various tools, and it is easily operated and accessible through the internet web browser. Knowledge management can be used effectively in e-learning course in C language and it can provide a learning grid to enable the students to identify the right learning objects in C language which is based on the student's context and personal preferences.