Description:

This work package focuses on internationalization through enrichment resp. semantification: In the course of increasing internationalization, both by students from other countries and by students who plan on staying abroad, there is a growing demand for teaching and learning materials in different languages. While foreign language teaching usually focuses on learning day-to-day language, learners often lack subject-specific vocabularies and their use in written and spoken word. A good example of multilingual knowledge representation is Wikipedia, where comparable articles in different languages can be displayed for the same topic. In many cases, this already provides an introduction to the vocabulary in written form. In collections of Open Educational Resources, there is usually no direct translation of the materials and thus no one-to-one link between materials in different languages. In order to establish the reference to comparable materials in different languages, the OERSI’s search terms are extended via existing links of terms from Wikidata and Wikipedia.

Interim results:

In a first step, individual subject areas with their translations were read out from Wikidata on the basis of a subject classification. The resulting multilingual subject classification was used for mapping subjects for existing and new sources. It was then made publicly available as terminology both for the OERSI and for the use in twillo. A module was developed to describe the materials with fixed keywords and translations in different languages, which will make suggestions based on Wikidata when assigning keywords. It can now be used in the context of OER portals to label published materials. In the context of the search index, Wikidata was tested and implemented for the extension of the search space to include content in different languages. Both the OERSI user interface and the cross-lingual search now exist in English, Ukrainian and Dutch in addition to German.

Ongoing work

Support for additional languages is planned, and Wikidata-based keyword mapping can already be tested for French, Spanish, and Danish. In the medium term, OERSI aims to support at least all European languages for mapping of keywords. The translation of the user interface, however, will focus on selected languages, as this requires manual maintenance of the translations and therefore depends on the cooperation with international partners.

Practical challenges:

As the size of the index and thus the volume of aggregated content increases, so does the requirement for a stronger focus on the needs of the users and thus the challenge of finding precisely fitting materials. As one approach to meet these challenges, further development is planned to identify appropriate materials based on module descriptions in module handbooks instead of single search terms.

Description:

The second work package focuses on the development of the above mentioned training program to support university educators as well as other interested parties, such as continuing education staff, in the use and creation of OER. Although there are already a variety of training courses on OER offered by established providers (e.g. Future Learn Lab, eBildungslabor, WirLernenOnline), these usually only deal with legal and didactic topics. However, outside of technical fields, the design of OER with the help of open systems (e.g. the Markdown markup language or technical applications based on it and the Git services) is given little attention. Yet their use has great advantages for creating open educational materials, as they are free of charge and allow to collaboratively edit materials, flexibly convert them into different formats, and manage different versions (cf. Ovadia 2019; Schröder, Pfänder 2020). The TOERN educational offering focuses primarily on these technical aspects of OER development. In addition to basic topics on the legally compliant use of OER and the licensing of one's own materials, its main goal is to show the participants what digital tools exist for creating educational materials as well as making them openly available not only in terms of licensing law, but also technically. Within different lessons, the participants get to know the interfaces of specific software or digital tools and get the chance to try out its most important functions.

The training program will be made available via a digital learning environment, which is integrated into the TIB infrastructure and will be designed as a modular digital setting that can be worked on in self-study. Each lesson is structured as a self-contained learning unit that covers the levels of beginners to advanced learners. In order to work through the entire course, knowledge from the preceding modules is required. However, to take the individual educational needs, motivations and interests of potential participants into account, all lessons are self-contained and can therefore be worked on independently of one another.

In order to stimulate an active learning process of the participants, the training program is designed according to the principles of action-oriented didactics (cf. Jank, Meyer 1994). Within the individual lessons, the participants are guided through the creation of their own OER in their respective subject area along practice-oriented tasks.

At the end of each module, a self-assessment is available that allows the participants to reflect on the content learned and to check their learning success. After successfully completing the self-tests, participants receive a digital learning badge as proof of their performance achieved and the competencies acquired. The reason for awarding learning badges, is that they have been shown to be particularly effective in motivating participants and provide a strong incentive to complete educational opportunities (cf. Mazarakis, A.; Bräuer 2023)

As figure 1 illustrates, the ideal journey for the Users of the (digital) networked infrastructure for education is as follows: They find the TOERN-educational offering on the (digital) networked infrastructure for education and can access the TIB learning environment via single sign-on (SSO). After completing the educational offer, they receive a digital badge that they can retrieve via an app called Enmeshed. The users can then decide whether to save the badge in the app or to share it on their profile of the (digital) networked infrastructure for education. From there, the certificate can be showcased whenever needed (i.e. in the context of an application procedure).

Fig 1: User Journey

Interim results and ongoing work:

In order to set up a suitable learning environment, the functionalities of various technical systems were tested. After some internal evaluation, it was decided to use the learning management system Moodle. The visual design of the Moodle systems was adjusted and first considerations for connecting the learning environment with the (digital) networked infrastructure for education were made. At the same time, the detailed planning and methodical design of the training concept was initiated and is still ongoing. It primarily includes the creation of teaching materials (e.g. texts, interactive quizzes, videos) for the use in the educational offer, the adaptation and further development of contents from courses previously conducted by the twillo team, and the search for supplementary teaching materials by other authors (e.g. videos, literature) that allow reuse.

Fig 2: Screenshot of the Moodle learning environment and the user interface of the LiaScript program for creating open courses with extended Markdown

Practical challenges:

The interfaces for connecting the continuing education offering to the (digital) networked infrastructure for education (SSO connection and automatic account creation upon initial login via SSO, establishment of the infrastructure for data transfer between the course environment and the data wallet in the Enmeshed app) were initially developed and implemented with a course pilot in the Wordpress content management system.

However, during the extensive testing of different plugins of the content management system for designing the educational offering in the implementation phase, limitations in their functionalities became apparent. For example, the integration of interactive learning objects was not possible as planned and the visual design options of the course were limited in the free versions of the plugins. Due to the goal of TOERN to promote free access to education and to make all developed materials openly available, the purchase of the paid extended versions of the plugins was refrained from. Since the providers of the plugins are located in the USA, data privacy hurdles became apparent. Against this background, the use of the plugins was abandoned and Moodle was set up. However, the choice of a new technical system necessitates the revision of the interfaces developed in the conception phase to connect the training environment to the (digital) networked infrastructure for education.