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How can we better mediate processes of learning at large institutions? Learning analytics are used primarily in online and blended learning environments to expose patterns in learning behaviour or interaction. They make use of digital traces from virtual learning environments and combine this with other learner data. The goal is to assist both educators and learners in improving their practice. In this work, we apply the concepts of 'psychological tools' and more 'knowledgeable others' from Lev Vygotsky, and Reuven Feuerstein's model of Mediated Learning Experiences to define prerequisites that learning analytics at scale must reach, in order to be a meaningful tool for mediating learning. We present findings from an in-depth qualitative study with educators and learners at a large, online institution of higher education. We then map insights gained from this study to our model of mediated learning. The resulting analysis and recommendations indicate that we need more inclusive and dedicated practices in learning analytics development, as well as institutional will to create more complex and meaningful tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) for training in public administration has yet to see a wide adoption globally, mostly due to challenges related to the discovery and reuse of high-quality OER for training purposes. These challenges, combined with the general lack of openness in the public sector, have greatly impacted the penetration of OER in public administration. This paper presents a case study on the use of OER for expanding and enhancing curricular and resource sharing in public administration in Greece. Within this case study, an OER authoring and sharing platform was introduced to the Greek public sector, employing crowdsourcing methods for supporting trainers and trainees in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing OER. The paper presents the deployment of this platform and the use of OER in the context of training programmes in the Greek public sector and reports on the lessons learned and the impact on public administration. The results of the case study showed that the use of OER was very positively received by civil servants, with a remarkable response, through active participation and engagement that led to the enhancement of existing OER and the co-creation of new ones for public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a sustainable approach for addressing the language skills gap among EU citizens, which significantly hinders their mobility across the EU and their participation in education, in training, as well as in youth programmes. Our approach is based on the sustainable design of the OpenLang Network platform, which provides an open and collaborative online learning environment for language learners and teachers across Europe, and addresses the limitations of existing computer-assisted language learning approaches. The OpenLang Network platform is bringing together educators and Erasmus+ mobility participants to improve their language skills and cultural knowledge. To this end, the OpenLang Network platform offers a collection of multilingual Open Educational Resources and language learning services. The paper presents the results from the user evaluation of the platform, which has been conducted with members of its community of language teachers and learners. A mixed methods approach has been adopted in order to collect and analyse both qualitative and quantitative data from users about the sustainable design of the OpenLang Network platform, as well as to measure the user satisfaction levels of the platform's language learning services. According to the user evaluation results, the platform offers a sustainable online environment and a positive user experience for language learning. The user evaluation has also helped us identify a set of best practices and challenges associated with the long-term sustainability of an online language learning community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main challenges commonly associated with acquiring practical network engineering skills are the requirements for access to specialised and up-to-date network equipment, as well as the high costs associated with obtaining and maintaining this equipment. The PT Anywhere initiative addresses these challenges by offering a mobile environment for acquiring practical knowledge and skills of network engineering. PT Anywhere facilitates learner-centred anywhere/anytime learning and offers learners access to high-quality interactive learning resources. Additionally, PT Anywhere employs Learning Analytics in order to help learners and educators in understanding and improving learning. This paper presents the learning design and software design principles driving the development of PT Anywhere, as well as the outcomes of an evaluation session conducted with members of the Cisco Networking Academy. The results of this evaluation indicate that PT Anywhere holds the potential to engage learners in different ways inside and outside of the classroom, without the need for access to specialised equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open Educational Resources (OERs), now available in large numbers, have a considerable potential to improve many aspects of society, yet one of the factors limiting this positive impact is the difficulty to discover them. This study investigates and proposes strategies to better support educators in discovering OERs, mainly focusing on secondary education. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of existing search systems could be improved by supporting high-level and domain-oriented tasks. Hence a preliminary taxonomy of discovery-related tasks was developed, based on the analysis of the literature, interpreted through Information Foraging Theory. This taxonomy was empirically evaluated with a few experienced educators, to preliminary identify an interesting class of Query By Examples (QBE) expansion by similarity tasks, which avoids the need to decompose natural high-level tasks in a complex sequence of sub-tasks. Following the Design Science Research methodology, three prototypes to support as well as to refine those tasks were iteratively designed, implemented, and evaluated involving an increasing number of educators in usability oriented studies. The resulting high-level and domain-oriented blended search/recommendation strategy, transparently replicates Google searches in specialized networks, and identifies similar resources with a QBE strategy. It makes use of a domain-oriented similarity metric based on shared schema.org/LRMI alignments to educational frameworks, and clusters results in expandable classes of comparable degree of similarity. The summative evaluation shows that educators appreciate this exploratory-oriented strategy because – balancing similarity and diversity – it supports their high-level tasks, such as lesson planning and personalization of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a projected six-figure skills gap looming in the US alone, here the authors share strategies and lessons learned regarding how to bridge the gap in training competent data scientists in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontologies provide the means for supporting business intelligence (BI) and information management through the interpretation of unstructured content. On the basis of the semantics of ontologies, information can be extracted from natural language texts, and on a further level of processing knowledge that facilitates BI can be discovered. However, in order to act this way, ontologies need to be properly modelled and evolved so that they are constantly aligned with changes that occur in the real world. This paper presents a framework for modelling the temporal aspects of a semantic knowledge base with direct impact on the BI process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Peer-to-Peer Learning Environment (P2PLE) is a proposed approach to helping learners co-construct their learning environment using recommendations about people, content, and tools. The work draws on current research on PLEs, and participant observation at the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU). We are particularly interested in ways of eliciting explicit, coded, user feedback, and in monitoring the transitions from state to state within the PLE. We discuss the ways in which these ideas can inform the design of a platform for peer-supported study of universitylevel mathematics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in the November and December 2007 issues, including "Toward a Social Semantic Web," by Alexander Mikroyannidis, "Automated Killers and the Computing Profession," by Noel Sharkey, and "Making Computers Do More With Less," by Simone Santini.

The World Wide Web's constant growth and transformation offers great opportunities--and poses many challenges for exploitation. The Semantic Web has emerged as a possible answer to these challenges by offering an approach in organizing and sharing the Web, but it doesn't explicitly consider user needs and requirements. Heraclitus is a framework for Semantic Web adaptation in which user needs and requirements are the driving force, using text and Web usage mining to support Web site ontology and topology evolution. The result is improved user interaction with the Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discuses Semantic Web and Social Web (Web 2.0), and asserts the two are not incompatible. Semantic Web attempts to make it easier for users to find information by putting web content into a form that software agents can maintain. Ontologies lie at the core of a Semantic Web architecture proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. Social Web encompasses collaborative technologies that make possible such sites as Wikipedia and Facebook. Data in the Social Web is often organize via tags. A Social Semantic Web, the article avers, can evolve if Social Web tags are used as the basis for creating Semantic Web ontologies.