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ELENA - Creating a Smart Space for Learning

Deliverables

Another outcome of the ELENA project are the best practice guidelines. Summarizing the experience gained via the interviews, studies and trials performed across European companies the resulting guidelines will reflect on how the ELENA results can help to make use of the concept of Smart Spaces for Learning. The main exploitation potential of these guidelines lies in its use fur future consultancy work. Some of the industrial partners, such as imc or Iceland Telecom as well as the Austrian spin-off company Knowledge Markets will benefit from these guidelines when consulting clients on the implementation of a Smart Space for Learning, or more general in looking for new ways of providing successful learning support.
The network search client is the place where learners go to find appropriate learning resources to fulfil their learning needs. The network search client is the central component of the HCD Suite's learning life-cycle, which connects a network of learning repositories via the Simple Query Interface (SQI). Here the software makes use of the learner's profile (language, interests), the learner's personal goals as well as his/her learning history to find appropriate learning resources in a personalised way
A Smart Space for Learning (SS4L) addresses the search to find appropriate learning services such as courses, seminars, and web-based training applications, by connecting multiple educational nodes and thereby providing an overview of the learning services available. The ELENA project set up an operational learning services network based on an interoperable communication infrastructure between heterogeneous system peers. The learning resource selection process is supported by a Personal Learning Assistant (PLA) that implements the intelligent mediation learning services based on user profiling, service evaluation and reputation ratings. The PLA is at the same time the interface for learning providers to place their offers in the network. In addition, the software called "HCD Suite" supports the training management process by different controlling and evaluation tools. To summarize the above goals in three distinct qualities, a Smart Space for Learning has three innovative aims: OPEN interfaces between heterogeneous systems and content, INTELLIGENT support to learners, and EFFECTIVE learning for individuals that serve the needs of organizations. It is the aim of the HCD Suite to support the HR development in its attempt to ensure that an employee constantly has access to the right training measures in order to optimise her own and her department's performance.
The goal of the Semantic Annotator is the (semi-)automatic semantic annotation of learning resources by analysing their description (and content) with the help of (multilingually annotated) topic / skill ontologies. This facilitates improved retrieval of learning resources: - In addition to normal full-text search, users can navigate through an ontology to specify (or refine) their queries. - Full-text queries can be evaluated in a more advanced way by first mapping the user input to ontological concepts which are then used for the retrieval; this allows multi-lingual access since the concepts are themselves language-independent. Since the annotations are based on an ontology, they can be used for inferencing (e.g. for personalisation), query expansion, and ranking search results (by taking the structure of the ontology into account, e.g., using path lengths to assess concept similarity).
The project website (www.elena-project.org) is the main dissemination tool of the ELENA project. The website holds all relevant information for any visitor to extract necessary information about the work conducted within the ELENA project. Furthermore, all contact details of the partners are there as well as the main results of ELENA accompanied by descriptions. The ELENA project website is constantly updated in order to provide the most up to date information but also depict to the visitors in which events and conferences the project will be disseminated and exploited.
The HCD Suite provides a full-fledged service for identifying and satisfying knowledge gaps and matches them with offers from different service providers according to the needs of the company and the individual learner. The latter is achieved by the consumption of heterogeneous learning resources ranging from traditional seminars over e-learning courses to in-house tutoring, which are all made available through the HCD Suite. Additionally, the HCD Suite will also support the needs and goals analysis, evaluation, transfer analysis and budget management of training activities. The HCD Suite implements a defined workflow that engages potential learners, managers, and human resource developers in a collaborative decision process on whether or not to consume a particular learning resource. It is based on a goal-driven human capital development approach and follows the ELENA designed human capital development (HCD) life cycle. The defined workflow also triggers the evaluation of learning resources on the various stages of the HCD life cycle.
The ELENA project has resulted in the development and implementation of an interface solution, the Simple Query Interface, which seems to address a crucial problem, both from an industry and academic perspective. The forthcoming years will tell if SQI will reach critical mass in terms of industry adoption. Standardization will play a crucial role in this process. We expect that SQI will successfully pass the standardization process at all major standardizing bodies (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, and IMS). As a result of that we can further expect that SQI will be part of L[C]MS releases of all major vendors and open source communities by the end of 2007. A benefit of this achievement relates to the reputation in the international standardisation committees of some of the consortium members and the ELENA project in general. The reputation gained during the project duration will allow for further contributions in the future. The contacts that has been established with similar initiatives has transformed into an active network that will continue to work on the interoperability issues in the future.
The prototype called "Personal Reader" is an experimental environment supporting personalized learning based on semantic web technologies. The prototype implements several methods needed for personalization suitable for an environment based on a fixed set of documents (a closed corpus) plus personalized context sensitive information from the semantic web. The Personal Reader embeds learning resources in a personalized context, providing a local context within a course or corpus, as well as a global context with references to external resources. Information model standards and open specifications like the IMS and IEEE ones recognized by the e-Learning community have driven development of schemas for several aspects of learning resources like learning objects, activities, assessments, learners, and portfolios. The ELENA consortium trialled the schemas in personalization contexts and the trials resulted in guidelines how to use standards in personalizing learning resources, search for them and navigation in them. The trials are supported by several prototypes like personal reader and personalized search.

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