Publications

The importance of a distance learning program heavily depends on the type and quality of the provided digital content. The Hellenic Open University (HOU) offers distance learning courses and therefore the volume of the provided digital learning content is significantly large. This fact establishes essential the need for an efficient and effective mechanism for searching, managing and retrieving the educational content. A modern approach for the organization of the digital learning material is the Learning Objects (LOs) paradigm, the use of which is adopted by many e-learning systems and applications nowadays. In this work we try to take advantage of all of the good characteristics of LOs and propose an instructional design methodology that builds courses based on these particular chunks of educational material. The aim of the proposed methodology is exactly to provide guidelines for the design and creation of courses based on LOs. Secondly, it intends to exploit semantic technologies in order to capture and represent the knowledge that is produced during each step. This semantically enriched information, regarding a course, is could be ideally utilized during the creation of LOs.

The learning of programming languages requires the student to develop systematic representations of the lexical constructs and semantic principles of the languages. At the same time, tutors are expected to develop the appropriate training content. In this paper we propose the combination of two techniques to make the above tasks more efficient.  Firstly, we propose to use Learning Objects (LOs), for the organization of educational content. At the same time, ontologies are rich knowledge representation structures that can be utilized for modeling the domain concepts. We then present how we can take advantage of the ontological models for two very popular programming languages – that is Java and C – in an attempt to provide tutors with the possibility to better organize their educational material.

Educational content plays a significant role in the process of delivering knowledge, thattextquoterights why it needs to be designed carefully, following designated principles. Learning Objects (LOs) constitute a novel approach in the educational contenttextquoterights organization, bearing features that if effectively used could lead to enhanced e-learning services. What is missing from literature, though, is a common agreement about the LOtextquoterights attributes and structure. For this reason, we initially try to specify the main characteristics of a LO and determine its functionality, especially in the context of distance education. Having realized its fundamental role in the instructional design process, we make explicit its correlation with educational objectives and other aspects of learning. Finally, in an attempt to capture all LOtextquoterights characteristics and make them utilizable by e-learning applications, we propose a metadata schema, reflecting all features of a LO, as described in this work.