Transformation at Scale

Author(s):  
Jack Zheng ◽  
Zhigang Li ◽  
Lei Li ◽  
Rebecca Rutherfoord

This chapter summarizes a unique department-wide effort in the adoption, development, implementation, and assessment of open educational resources (OER) for a wide range of information technology courses. The chapter presents the development principles and practices at four levels: OER-driven pedagogies, OER adoption and development, course design/review cycle, and department/program level coordination. The chapter also provides an overview of the OER features and adoption in the computing and IT field.

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 565-573
Author(s):  
Sahan Bulathwela ◽  
Maria Perez-Ortiz ◽  
Emine Yilmaz ◽  
John Shawe-Taylor

The recent advances in computer-assisted learning systems and the availability of open educational resources today promise a pathway to providing cost-efficient high-quality education to large masses of learners. One of the most ambitious use cases of computer-assisted learning is to build a lifelong learning recommendation system. Unlike short-term courses, lifelong learning presents unique challenges, requiring sophisticated recommendation models that account for a wide range of factors such as background knowledge of learners or novelty of the material while effectively maintaining knowledge states of masses of learners for significantly longer periods of time (ideally, a lifetime). This work presents the foundations towards building a dynamic, scalable and transparent recommendation system for education, modelling learner's knowledge from implicit data in the form of engagement with open educational resources. We i) use a text ontology based on Wikipedia to automatically extract knowledge components of educational resources and, ii) propose a set of online Bayesian strategies inspired by the well-known areas of item response theory and knowledge tracing. Our proposal, TrueLearn, focuses on recommendations for which the learner has enough background knowledge (so they are able to understand and learn from the material), and the material has enough novelty that would help the learner improve their knowledge about the subject and keep them engaged. We further construct a large open educational video lectures dataset and test the performance of the proposed algorithms, which show clear promise towards building an effective educational recommendation system.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (33) ◽  
pp. 613-629
Author(s):  
B. BAZYLOVA ◽  
Z. ZHUSUPOVA ◽  
G. KAZHIGALIEVA ◽  
A. ONALBAYEVA ◽  
V. KALININA

The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that open educational resources carry the ability to overcome the basic methodological construct complicating the learning process among students and namely the use of international experience while learning and obtaining knowledge. This study shows the aspects of functioning open educational resources and their technological basis. The novelty of the work was the formation of a model for the use of open educational resources in training of specialized courses of the Department of applied chemistry. The authors showed that the effectiveness of open educational resources use depends directly on the share of online learning and technological isolation of subjects. In particular, not only learning processes in the implementation of the program in applied chemistry, but also other disciplines that require the exchange of experience between countries and the use of a wide range of technological equipment and online structure are considered. In particular, training on the example of databases, information networks, and other spatially distributed structures are considered too. The practical significance of the study is defined by the fact that the use of open educational resources will not only intensify the learning process at the university, but also to determine the possibility of integration into the world educational space.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Geith ◽  
Karen Vignare

One of the key concepts in the right to education is access: access to the means to fully develop as human beings as well as access to the means to gain skills, knowledge and credentials. This is an important perspective through which to examine the solutions to access enabled by Open Educational Resources (OER) and online learning. The authors compare and contrast OER and online learning and their potential for addressing human rights “to” and “in” education. The authors examine OER and online learning growth and financial sustainability and discuss potential scenarios to address the global education gap.


1997 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Fierro ◽  
J. Norrie ◽  
A. Gosselin ◽  
C. J. Beauchamp

In a greenhouse study, deinking sludge was evaluated as a soil amendment supplemented with four nitrogen (N) fertilization levels for the growth of the grasses Agropyron elongatum (Host.) Beauv. (tall wheatgrass), Alopecurus pratensis L. (meadow foxtail), Festuca ovina var. duriuscula (L). Koch (hard fescue), and four levels of phosphorus (P) for the growth of the legumes Galega orientalis Lam. (galega), Medicago lupulina L. (black medic), Melilotus officinalis (L.) Lam (yellow sweet clover). Fertilizers were applied on the basis of sludge level to maintain uniform carbon (C)/N or C/P ratios across sludge treatments. In one experiment, sand was mixed with 0, 10, 20 or 30% sludge while, in a second experiment, mineral soil was mixed with 0, 27, 53 or 80% sludge (vol/vol). In sand mixtures of 30 and 20% sludge, grasses had similar or greater growth than in unamended mineral soil when N was added at about 6.5 and 8.4 g kg−1 deinking sludge, respectively. For all legumes but Medicago lupulina, P at about 0.8 g kg−1 sludge was required for these sand mixtures. In soil mixtures of 53 and 27% sludge, grasses grew well when supplemental N was about 5.3 and 6.9 g kg−1 sludge, respectively. Legumes required P at 0.5 and 1.2 g kg−1 sludge, respectively. In general, growth was closely related to total amount of added N or P in spite of the wide range of C/N or C/P ratios. When growing in media amended with sludge, grasses needed higher tissue N concentration for an equivalent growth than in control soil; legumes had similar tissue P concentration. The grasses Agropyron elongatum and Alopecurus pratensis as well as the legumes Melilotus officinalis and Galega orientalis are promising species for field testing, based on dry matter production. Deinking sludge can be used as soil amendment when adequate N and P supplements are provided. Key words: Soil amendment, papermill sludge, Agropyron elongatum, Alopecurus pratensis, Festuca ovina, Medicago lupulina, Galega orientalis, Melilotus officinalis


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