Technical Concepts and Technologies

Ontology - a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain of discourse. 9

Activity feed (Activity stream) - a list of recent activities performed by an individual(s), typically on a single website or on a single content piece.

Mash-up - (in the domain of OCW authoring) it is a web page, or web application, that uses content from more than one source to create a single new learning object or OCW.

RSS - originally RDF Site Summary, but often dubbed as Really Simple Syndication. It is a mechanism to publish a feed of frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video etc.10

RSS aggregator - a tool that periodically checks for updates to the RSS feed and keeps the user informed of any changes [6].

Grid - a collection of independently owned and administered resources which have been joined together by a software and hardware infrastructure that interacts with the resources and the users of the resources to provide coordinated dynamic resource sharing in a dependable and consistent way according to policies that have been agreed to by all parties [59].

Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) - tools that support e-learning through integrated provision of learning materials, and communication, administration, and assessment tools [31].

3.4 Educational Content Co-creation Studies

Changing reality poses new conditions and requirements for e-learning platforms. As it is mentioned in [101], “the amount of knowledge that we deal with is much bigger than before,

the interrelations between different forms of information are much more complex”. Due to

this, new approaches for learning process organization have to be created. Thus, a model in which a teacher is the monopolizing agent and the authorized representative of knowledge is no more adequate. Learners should be allowed to have their own knowledge and share it with teachers, in other words teachers and learners should be able to switch their roles during the

9 _{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)} 10_{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS}

learning process. The possibility of any user, including learners to edit the content together with modification history and discussion pages positively influences the reliability of the content [70]. In the section we summarize the known solutions and techniques to facilitate all aspects of such large-scale collaboration on open educational content.

3.4.1 Collaborative Content Authoring

During the literature study we have found three approaches of how the large-scale collaboration on educational content can be organized. The first solution is to use a complex of (intercon- nected) web 2.0 services. For example, an approach described in [26] proposes the combination of Google Site, Google groups, micro-blogging and RSS technologies to collaboratively create OCW for blended learning. Course site includes curriculum, description, learning guide and teaching calendar. The updates on the site are sent to all subscribers through RSS. Site admin- istrators can manually create a topic on the Google Groups page to discuss arguable changes before approving them. The similar approach proposed in [16] uses Google Drive to create self-assessment questions. The produced questions are then converted into digital flashcard by self-developed freely distributed Java-based program. The authors explain the choice of Google Drive by three factors: (1) Multiple people can simultaneously edit and view a document, spreadsheet, or PowerPoint, (2) it is user-friendly, and (3) just about all students are familiar with it.

The second solution is to add support of collaboration to existing non-collaborative OCW authoring tools. In the approach [54] authors integrate Joomla, Moodle and MediaWiki to support the collaborative authoring of educational content. The authors choose Joomla as the basis authoring tool due to the possibility to insert video records, Latex formulas, applets and highlighted code fragments. Moreover, during the content creation process, a publicly available knowledge base for each course is created through collaborative content annotation. The similar approach is described in [67]. The proposed web-based system allows students to share algorithmic representations with their peers. Students can create their algorithmic representation using any utility or software, and can upload those files using the system. These representations are then available for other students to view, evaluate and discuss through discussion forums.

However, we have concluded that the most popular and promising solution is to use an integrated platform based on wiki technology. According to existing research [70, 53], the list of benefits of the wiki technology when applied to educational context includes:

• users (teachers and students) are able to contribute to their private collections of various learning resources (documents, files, photos, videos, software etc,.) by uploading to given positions

• wiki-based collaborative learning environment provides a completely user-editable envir- onment and thoroughly integrate the roles of author and reader.

• users can organize their resources in a thematic way, designing and creating different tags and share them with other users.

• authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of resources.

However, the specific of wikis arises a number of issues when applied to OCW authoring. The technical issues are indicated, for example in [136, 43]:

3.4 Educational Content Co-creation Studies

• All content is modifiable by any user. The instructor may want to restrict modifiability of certain pages.

• All content is open to everybody. A page, of which an important part is being developed, may be undesired to be issued, but wikis do not permit this.

• Simultaneous edits are allowed, but not successful. When simultaneous writings are being performed on a page, wikis are locked.

• Wikis can be evolved without end. An instructor may want to end the evaluation when the class ends; many wikis do not allow this.

Apart from the technical issues, there are two major obstacles preventing the usage of wikis in OCW development: (1) absence of possibility to structure the content as it is required by the learning object definition and (2) user engagement.