Using linked data to blended educational materials with OER—A general context of synergy: Linked data for describe, discovery and retrieve OER and human beings knowledge to provide context

Abstract

The OER movement has challenged the traditional value chain by employing new methods to deliver high-quality educational content. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as to facilitate knowledge sharing, and capacity building. OER not only play a crucial role in nonformal and informal learning but they are actual resources/tools that can help enrich any classroom environment and push student thinking and comprehension. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge”, and therefore be a way to create more economic and personalized learning. To facilitate combining, remixing, or adaptation of OER, a key condition is to improve the metadata interoperability between different collections of open material siloed, i.e., the OER data should be readable for both people and humans. The Linked Data design issues and semantic technologies enable the creation and reuse of data models, concepts, and properties that are then connected, consulted, and combined on the Web, as if they were simply part of a global database. This work shows the evolution of Open Educational Movement and the potential of use of linked data approach to improve the discoverability, reusability, and integration of these materials available in the Web and support the inclusion of OER in courses, from a general context of synergy: Linked Data for describe, discovery, and retrieve OER and Human Beings power to provide context. The authors focus on a type of openness: open of contents as regards alteration, i.e., freedom to reuse the educational material, to combine it with other academic materials, to adapt, and to share it further under an open license.