«OER4all – Open educational resources for all through LinkedData»
Nelson PiedraUPM
Abstract
The popularity of Open Educational Resources (OER/OER) in recent years has led to a tremendous growth in open materials, many of which are designed without a wide audience in mind. It is key that organizations that publish Open Educational Resources (OER), observe accessibility and inclusion considerations during the design and release of educational materials in order to maximize user access. In this way, GICAC has used Semantic Web and LinkedData approaches to describe explicit information about technical and pedagogical accessibility of OpenCourseWare in machine-readable formats, regardless of whether the OER is a PDF, image, presentation, video or text. The GICAC will present Serendipity, an OCW search engine, and prototypes based on Linked Data and accessibility criteria, which have been designed to improve the use, re-use, and the way in which open educational materials are distributed.
Bio
Nelson Piedra is a professor-researcher of Computer Science at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador. He is currently the Director of the Computer Science Research Institute at UTPL. His current research focuses on various aspects of the semantic web, data linked to the Internet of Things, big data, social network analysis, personal recommendation systems, and mobile computing. His work is based both in the field of higher education (accessibility, interoperability and usability of OCW/OER, educational content, distance learning systems) and in the technical dimension (representation of knowledge/data, computer science, intelligence artificial). Nelson Piedra is a member of the UPM-GICAC (Group for Innovation in Quality Management of University Centers). He currently heads the UTPL-OpenCourseWare Office.
