International Standards in High and Open and Distance Education are used for developing Open Educational Resources (OERs). Current issues in e-learning community are the specification of learning chunks and the definition of describing designs for different units of learning (activities, units, courses) in a generic though expandable format. Developing educational content, courseware and pedagogical tools to support Subject Matter Experts in their educational practice is a challenging task for the Instructional Design Field. This papertextquoterights aim is to introduce a user oriented design methodology for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) activities orchestrating pedagogical tools so as to develop e-learning activities in Hellenic Open University (HOU) by the use of Boundary Objects (BOs).

International Standards in High and Open and Distance Education are used for developing Open Educational Resources (OERs). Current issues in e-learning community are the specification of learning chunks and the definition of describing designs for different units of learning (activities, units, courses) in a generic though expandable format. Developing educational content, courseware and pedagogical tools to support Subject Matter Experts in their educational practice is a challenging task for the Instructional Design Field. This papertextquoterights aim is to introduce a user oriented design methodology for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) activities orchestrating pedagogical tools so as to develop e-learning activities in Hellenic Open University (HOU) by the use of Boundary Objects (BOs).

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.

\emph{In this paper we present an ontology we developed that can be used to store eJob profiles based on the European eCompetence Framework (e-CF). We outline the methodology we used, and then we present the ontology itself, together with instance job profiles. We demonstrate the use of the ontology with the help of competence queries.
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The importance of Learning Objects (LOs) in the learning process - especially in the case of distance education - has been underlined significantly in the literature. The ability of administrating LOs in terms of accessibility, reusability and interoperability seems to be ensured by adopting an appropriate metadata schema which fully and adequately describes them. Several metadata standards have been developed such as DC (Dublin Core) and IEEE-LOM. In the context of our work, we explore them and conclude that none of these standards does completely meet the requirements of distance learning material. Therefore, we propose a new metadata schema that is actually an application profile of the widely adopted IEEE LOM and has special orientation in distance education. We also enrich this subset with some additional attributes that represent concepts like learning outcomes. Then, we create an ontological representation of this new educational schema with a view to improving the potential of LOstextquoteright discovery and retrieval within an intelligent e-learning system.

Nowadays we witness a move towards learner centered education, primarily supported by a combination of distance learning methodologies and educational technologies. Among the latter, social media, which refers to technologies that can facilitate social interaction, collaboration and deliberation, show a continuously growing popularity (Bryer & Zavattaro, 2011). Examples of social media include wikis, blogs and social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and virtual worlds like Second Life (Hu & Johnson, 2011). These environments are used to complement the tele-conferencing systems that were used in the previous decade to support collaboration and engagement.

This paper presents the collaboration environments used by the academic community of Hellenic Open University, focusing on wikis and tele-conferencing. Our aim is to use them to create a student-centered collaborative learning environment, keeping in mind that simply making an empty wiki available to online adult students is not enough (Mindel & Verma, 2006). For this reason, we also discuss our approach (Learning Design cycle) towards developing digital educational content for the courses offered by HOU. 

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.

Java is a very popular programming language and many study programs in Informatics worldwide include courses particularly designed for its learning. It is considered as the best paradigm for introducing students with object-oriented programming and concepts. Considering Javatextquoterights popularity, we initially make an attempt to model this language by using a quite expressing and rich knowledge representation structure, like is ontology. Our aim is to capture the semantics of Java concepts in a way that would render them utilizable by intelligent e-learning applications. Because the construction of an ontology is not an easy task, we follow very specific steps when building the Java ontology. We then take advantage of an already implemented model describing the structure of learning outcomes and combine it with our ontology, with a view to offer a more effective way in organizing the course of Java in the Hellenic Open University.

One of the most important tasks in the process of designing educational material for distance learning is the representation and modeling of the cognitive domain to which the material refers. However, this representation should be formal, complete and reusable in order to be used by intelligent tutoring system applications, other knowledge domains or tutors. In the context of this work, we propose a methodology that relies on the notion of ontology so as to represent the knowledge domain. Moreover, this methodology has been applied to the educational material of the Hellenic Open University.

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.

Learning outcomes are statements that should accompany any type of educational material intended for lifelong learning. These statements deliver important information, which works as an indicator for students in the process of learning. However, in order for this information to be further utilizable within the context of intelligent e-learning applications, a more fine-grained definition and structure should be adopted. Having these in mind, we initially assign a strict and rather technical definition for the notion of learning outcomes, which is fully aligned, though, with their educational purpose. We then propose an ontological model for their representation and classification, which fully adheres to this definition. Our ultimate goal is to provide the mean for exploiting all aspects of knowledge implied by such statements within intelligent applications. To bear out this possibility, we apply our model to a selected piece of educational material provided by the Hellenic Open University.

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) offers personalized education to each student in accordance with his/her learning preferences and his/her background. One of the most fundamental components of an ITS is the student model, that contains all the information about a student such as demographic information, learning style and academic performance. This information enables the system to be fully adapted to the student. Our research work intends to propose a student model and enhance it with semantics by developing (or via) an ontology in order to be exploitable effectively within an ITS, for example as a domain-independent vocabulary for the communication between intelligent agents. The ontology schema consists of two main taxonomies: (a) studenttextquoterights academic information and (b) studenttextquoterights personal information. The characteristics of the student that have been included in the student model ontology were derived from an empirical study on a sample of students.

Social  Networking Services (SNS) provide users with functionalities for developing  their on line social networks, connecting with  other users,  sharing and  consuming content. While  most  of popular SNS provide open  Web  2.0 APIs,  they remain disconnected from each  other thus  fragmenting usertextquoterights data,  social  network and  content. Semantic social  web technologies  such as public  vocabularies and  ontologies  can be used for bridging the semantic gap between  different SNS. Ontology-based representations  of  SNS  APIs  can  help developers share knowledge  about  SNS APIs  and  can  be used for linking  APIs  with  public  Social  Semantic Web  ontologies and  vocabularies and  for enabling automatic ontology-based service   composition.  In   this   paper,  we  study   the   API   of Google+  SNS and  create an  ontology  based  representation of its structural and functional properties. The proposed ontology describes valuable structural and functional details  of the API, in a machine processable format useful  for understanding the API and  appropriate for integrating into ontology  based Mashups.

In recent years, several studies have shown that ontologies and technologies based on ontologies can be used to bridge the worlds of practice and education. These approaches are considered very important fields of educational technology research. In this paper, we present a domain ontology concerning Use Case Diagrams (UCD) that we developed in an attempt to provide common reference for the creators of training / educational material in a Software Engineering course. For its construction we used an approach that combines certain existing methodologies and includes the collaboration of expert software engineers, who eventually evaluated positively the ontology to cover adequately all aspects of UCD design. The proposed ontology can be used either as part of an experimental e-learning application for the description and management of competencies, learning goals and learning material about the cognitive field of Object-Oriented Analysis, or as a design reference for UCD terms and properties. In this paper we shortly describe our ontology and the methodology we used to create it.

One of the principal objectives of todaytextquoterights ambient intelligence environments is to provide users with services according to their activity, i.e. preferences in order to accomplish a specific user goal. For this purpose, miscellaneous user information must be collected and structured into user profiles. These profiles offer the advantage of being easily enriched and exploitable by the environment, in order to deliver to the user, at any moment and at any place, the best fitted service, with regard to his activity. In this paper we present an ontology-based user

profile model which provides the static data about a user but also the context of the user in a given situation in real time.

Future ubiquitous computing environments integrate the services of everyday objects equipped with tiny processors and sensors into distributed applications. These smart devices can communicate with each other and also explore their environment. In order for the applications to function properly, policies need to be defined, which determine ways that they can be used, protected, changed, etc. A policy can be considered as a set of rules, specified by users, which are usually applied by a policy manager. In this paper we proposed an alternative approach, which supports the adoption of policies directly by the applications without the need of an enforcing policy manager. Two everyday scenarios are used as examples that demonstrate the validity of the approach.

Educational processtextquoteright experimental implementation with the support of  nformation Communication Technologies (ICT) integrated to the elective course "Principles of Environmental Sciences" of the Second High School Class that combines  environmental education, principles of space design,introduction to information technologies in ecology and "green" ICT, and sustainable development through the digital management of planting and of the introduction to the crucial wider issue of precision agriculture. The experimental implementation is realized in collaboration with the professors of the 1rst General High School of Agios Dimitrios. Temperature sensors, humidity and illumination are placed in structures parametrically designed according to the bioclimatic conditions of the space of the school yard and have been sited in accordance with the operational needs of the complex. Students interact with plants and offer maintenance services when plants request it.

Future computing environments involve integrating everyday objects equipped with tiny processors, sensors and wireless network cards. These smart objects (artifacts) may explore their environment and communicate with each other.

Interactivity with humans may provide the ability of dealing with tasks in an intuitive way. Activity spheres are/include such smart artifacts in order to provide functionality of various applications. The privacy of the users is considered as a major issue due to the invisibility of all computations which leads to the users being unaware of them. This paper describes how the privacy of the resources within each activity sphere owned by a user can be protected, by applying a privacy policy ontology, called PROACT.

In this paper, we shall discuss the role of Cultural Mediators and their qualifications and training needs, and then we shall present the a distant training course that we developed as part of the LdV TIPS project. The course employed the T-learning methodology and involved three technological platforms, namely Internet, mobile phones and IPTV, in order to ensure continuous availability and timely deployment of the course content. Finally, we shall present an assessment of the course based on the personal testimonies and the evaluation results of the TIPS Greek Class.

Pervasive or Ubiquitous computing is a new technological paradigm in which

every thing around us has built-in and interconnected computers (Weiser, 1991;

Disappearing Computer, 2007). Embedded in everyday objects these interconnected devices (also called artifacts) open up an unlimited number of possibilities for many new applications and services (Norman, 1999; Bergman, 2000). Applications result from the dynamic and adaptive composition of such artifacts, triggered via explicit user/application requests, application/task templates, or even more autonomic interaction schemes. Then, in this context, a textquotedblleftsystemtextquotedblright is defined to be the collective, complex service that emerges as an aggregation of simpler services offered by independent artifacts.