Open Educational Resources (OER) are digital learning materials available for free on the Internet which provide the user the rights to reuse, adapt and redistribute. For teachers, OER provide more opportunities to diversify their lectures by reusing available OER. An exact number of OER available worldwide cannot be given, but estimations run into many millions. To better find these resources, in many cases metadata are added. However, adding metadata is a tedious task, best done by a professional (e.g. a librarian). These professionals are not always available. Also, standards used for metadata (e.g. IEEE LOM) do not provide topic specific information a teacher uses when searching for OER. Therefore, low findability of the right resources for specific contexts is experienced as a barrier for teachers, thereby hindering adoption of OER.
To overcome these barriers, machine learning techniques are developed to automatically add metadata to resources. In this talk an overview will be given of experiments in this area and the first results of these experiments.
Robert Schuwer is Professor Open Educational Resources (OER) at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, School of ICT in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In September 2016 he was appointed Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on OER at Fontys. Since 2006 the majority of his work is about OER and Open Education. Among other activities, he was project leader in the Wikiwijs program, aiming at enhancing awareness on OER and creating a national infrastructure for OER, initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Education. Currently, he is the leader of the track “Towards (open) digital resources” in the Dutch Acceleration Plan for Innovating Higher Education using Information Technology. His current research is on adoption of OER and other forms of open online education by the early and late majority of teachers. He is chairman of the SURF Dutch Special Interest Group Open Education.