The Setting for Semantic Web-Based Education

Summary

Semantic Web-based education is currently getting momentum, and the interest of the e-Learning community for SWBE is rising. There is a good chance for SWBE to progress at the same pace as the Semantic Web itself, since much of the technology needed is already there.

Key concepts and issues of SWBE include:

• educational content, represented as learning objects of different granularity, stored in different digital libraries, learning object repositories, and on different educational servers;

• educational servers, as specific Web applications running on physical servers and enabling storing, retrieving, updating LOs, as well as different educational services;

• educational Web services, as Semantic Web services that support learning, teaching, and authoring processes;

• personalization and adaptivity of educational processes, based on learner modeling;

• educational ontologies of different kinds (domain, pedagogical, communication, task-related, and so forth), used for annotation of learning resources, educational Web services, and interoperation between the services and applications;

• intelligent pedagogical agents that reduce the manual efforts of end users by performing intelligent search and retrieval of LOs, locating, invocation, and composition of educational Web services, and otherwise acting on behalf of the end users;

• Semantic Web technology and standardization efforts, as well as related standardization initiatives related to WBE.