Linked data for improving student experience in searching e-learning resources

Abstract: The collection and the use of data on the internet with e-learning purposes are tasks made by many people every day, because of their role as teachers or students. The web provides several data sources with relevant information that could be used in educational environments, but the information is widely distributed, or poorly structured. Also, resources on the web are diverse, sometimes with high quality, but sometimes not. These situations involve a difficult search of e-learning resources, and therefore a lot of time invested, because the search process – typing, reasoning, selecting, using resources, bookmarking, and so forth - is completely executed by humans, despite that some of them can be executed by computers. Linked data provides designed practices for organizing, and for discovering information using the processing power of computers. At the same time, the community of linked data provides data sets that are already connected, and this information could be consumed by people anytime as resources with e-learning purposesThe current article presents the findings of a master thesis that address the linked data techniques and also the techniques used by students when searching e-learning resources, using internet. The resources used by the students, as well as the sources preferred, will be comparing with the current resources offered by the linked data community. Likewise, the strategies and techniques selected by the students will be taken into account, in order to establish the basic requirements of an e-learning collaborative environment prototype.The outline of the thesis is:Chapter 2 discusses the research methodology as well as the constructing and administering the research survey in which the current thesis based the requirements elicitation. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for the rest of the thesis by presenting the principles and terminology of linked data, as well as related work about the internet in education, availability of e-learning resources, and surveys about the use of the internet in e-learning resources searchingChapter 4 presents the investigation of the methods used by student for exploring and discovering e-learning resources through the data analysis and interpretation of the survey. Chapter 5 Introduces to the prototype design. It includes the prototype idea, the requirements specification using the data analysis of the survey, and the architecture of the e-learning collaborative environment using the assumptions reached in the literature review and the dereferencable URIs found in the linked open data cloud diagram. The design of components in the environment will be addressed in terms of UML diagrams. Chapter 6 Validates the requirements of the prototype.Chapter 7 Tackles conclusions of the master thesis project in order to find incomes for further research in the area. This chapter also shows the contributions e-learning world evaluation is based on the benefits indentified by using this approach and gives indications of what future work can be done to improve the results. The findings address the decision-making process for designing a new era of e-learning environments that enhance the selection of e-learning resources, taking into account the technology available, and the information around the World Wide Web.