SERVICE BASED EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT - STEP TOWARDS TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD CONSUMPTION

Oleksiy Khriyenko Industrial Ontologies Group, MIT Department and Agora Center University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35(Agora), Jyväskylä, Finland

oleksiy.khriyenko@jyu.fi

ABSTRACT

The change in ICT supported business is characterized by increased courage to adopt new technology solutions (service oriented computing, cloud computing and business process management) to support the business needs. Sooner or later, changes in ICT domain and new digital technologies might reach the education process development and lead to innovations in this area. Advance educational services and platforms should aim to develop an environment that is not bound to location or time, that makes it possible to access information anywhere, anytime, and in more suitable and personalized for user form. eLearning and augmented reality offer high potential for interactive materials that could enrich the learning experience. Thus, our environment and context can be integrated into the learning process. This brings the education to a new level. This paper tackles two issues that lie between technological world and education domain. First issue concerns mashup based supportive platform for collaborative study content creation. Another issue concerns human adaptation and technological world consumption in personalized education process.

KEYWORDS

Education services, education content creation, personal study advisor, collaborative education environment, eLearning.

1. INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, a significant change in ICT supported business is characterized by globalization of business networks, by dependency of organizations on agility to catch new business opportunities, new business models and new partners. The change is characterized by increased courage to adopt new technology solutions (service oriented computing, cloud computing and business process management) to support the business needs. Sooner or later, changes in ICT domain and new digital technologies might reach the education process development and lead to innovations in this area. Traditional way of studying has to be changed. We live in dynamic technological world, surrounded with huge variety of information, data formats, social media and mobile technologies that require substantially different information processing skills. Ignorance of new technological achievements results in the deterioration of motivation and learning results of today’s youth (Luukka et al. 2008). Fortunately, multimedia materials and digital education spaces enrich printed media. New technology enables natural interaction with learning materials, utilizing the full sensory capabilities of the human learner. Advance educational services and platforms should aim to develop an environment that is not bound to location or time (Traxler, 2007), and in more suitable and personalized for user form. Advanced multimodal mobile and Web technologies provide a number of options for implementing solutions for pervasive learning. eLearning and augmented reality offer high potential for interactive materials that could enrich the learning experience. Smart devises with location awareness and access to online information could offer great tools for getting educational information on our surroundings. Our environment and context can be integrated into the learning process. Thus, achievements of technological world, applier to education domain, might bring education to a totally new level.

In this paper, author tackles two issues that lie between technological world and education domain. First issue concerns mashup based supportive platform for collaborative study content creation and reuse. Very few non-IT specialized domain experts feel comfortable themselves utilizing services and features that technological world proposes to them nowadays. Usually, teachers lack supportive tools that may hide

complexity of technologies and allow concentrating on domain specific issues. One way to enhance content creation process and produce innovative study materials is to elaborate mashup-based platform for a new content creation based on automated/semi-automated composition of contents retrieved from external services or applications. The second part of the paper concerns human-oriented assistance for technological world consumption in a form of personalized education-related decision support system.

2. ENVIRONMENT FOR COLLABORATIVE UBIQUITOUS EDUCATION

2.1 Platform for service mashups and collaborative content creation

Ubiquitous learning (uLearning) as a combination of eLearning and mLearning can activate students in new ways (Casey and Fraser, 2010). Playful learning materials enable learning by exploration and educational exercise games can activate the student physically. However, the potential offered by new technologies is still largely underused at schools, universities and in work life. There is a lot of unexploited potential for advance educational services. There are not enough tools and platforms that enable innovative new ways of teaching and learning. Existing current educational software are hard to use and optimally integrate into the teaching institution’s everyday processes. We have to elaborate more sophisticated support for adaptation of materials as well as tools for collaborative content creation and editing.

The Internet has provided us an interconnected world for easy information exchange, collaborative tasks processing, world that allows us to achieve efficiency and improve performance organizing communities among users with similar interests. Web services allow deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications, and span companies’ boundaries through business processes connection. As the next step, the mashup concept has emerged and allowed development of various Web 2.0 applications (Maximilien EM. et. al, 2008). Increasing numbers of web sites and Web services provide open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to enable user-generated dynamic web applications, and widen the user flexibility for dynamic Web mashup services. For example, such map services providers as Google Maps or Nokia Maps provide open APIs for location management, event handling, object controlling and overlapping functions, to manipulate items on the map. These open APIs enable users to unify multiple useful objects from multiple sites on a single web page. Mashup concept indicates a way to create new Web applications through combination of existing Web resources. Mashups are actually about to support content publishing for a new generation of Web applications through information sharing and aggregation. Currently, mashup tools move further towards semantic approach utilization to deal with service interoperability and integration. Service mashups become very important as Web applications and Web data grow.

Applying, mentioned above, efforts of technological world to education domain, we may achieve valuable benefits and improve the way we produce study content for uLearning. Using such capability of mashups platforms as semantic integration of existing Web applications and aggregation of content that they produce, we may develop perfect toolset for domain experts to produce new study content. Such toolset will hide complexity of the technologies and will make heterogeneous data available for more effective and innovative content creation. As an example of collaborative study content creation, we would like to consider Crossroad on Demand Service – testbed and study content creation platform for driving schools. The main goal of the platform is to provide a toolset for domain experts to create location personalized learning and test materials. Applying mixed-reality concept, platform provides possibility to combine content from several services (map provider, traffic regulation unit, etc.) as a background for education content creation.

2.2 Crossroad on Demand Services

According to the statistics, the significant amount of people dies and gets damage in car accidences. There are a lot of factors that cause and might influence on this statistic. Usually, relevance of these factors is context dependent, but one of these factors is education and experience level of the driver. To increase the quality of education and training level of the future drivers is one of the main goals of the society. At the same time a prophylaxis and training of the drivers plays very important role as well. Thus, any supportive activities towards increasing training level and awarenes of the drivers may significantly decrease amount of accidences and save lives. Taking into account a fact that crossroads (passage of them) is the most important

and significant part of the studies in a driving school, it would be reasonable to concentrate efforts on this topic and develop a service that allows collaborative education content creation for driving school experts/instructors and give an opportunity for students and other regular drivers to test and train their skills on personalized location-based crossroads. Thinking about traffic related education on a large scale, we have to care about pedestrian safety and their education level as well. We lack of innovative study materials for pedestrians nowadays. Interactive personalized location-based study content for pedestrians might be very useful especially for children to become familiar with the nearby crossroads of their daily life activities.

Nowadays, printed study materials are complimented with digital content (PowerPoint presentations, driving simulators and various testing applications). Unfortunately, this digital content is not configurable and limited with certain set of predefined use cases. The latest trends in e-learning domain are aimed at elaboration of the platforms for distance learning and dynamic collaborative creation of the study content. Crossroads on Demand Service aims to improve the education process in driving schools and increase the training level and awareness of the drivers through the personalized location-based training support. Service has dual nature. From the one side, service will be utilized by driving schools for education purposes as a development platform for study content creation. Service provides a tool for driving school experts/instructors to create tests (various crossroad situations) in a fast visual way on top of mash-up of map and traffic related data. Such service gives an opportunity to all the experts in the field to contribute to the study content creation process and facilitates the content growth. Meanwhile, service plays role of a testbed for driving school students (and other drivers) to learn new material and test their knowledge and skills solving various situations on selected crossroads of real cities.

The main feature of the services, that brings added value and makes service attractive and useful is personalization and location based nature of it. All the crossroads of the system are real crossroads of real cities with current traffic regulation conditions. Gathered information from traffic regulation and other road related systems will be integrated with real map and will be utilized as a background for test and study materials (see Figure 1). Location-based study content creation will be attractive and helpful for students. With the purpose to better prepare students for practical part of the studies, driving schools would be able to create the study content relevant to their location (city, region, etc.). It will help students to study and test the knowledge on the crossroads of their own city, to become more familiar with the crossroads on which they are going to practice in the future. Being connected to the official database of traffic regulation organization (location of road signs, traffic lights, road works, etc.), service will be aware about any changes in crossroads regulations, and all the correspondent modifications caused by those changes will be handled by the service automatically and presented on a map on-the-fly. Thus, the service makes drivers aware of current situation and any changes of the traffic regulation conditions.

This feature of the services will entertain the students and make them more interested in the study process. Being publicly available, services would be very useful for any other drivers (especially for young inexperienced drivers). Service will help them to find and become familiar with the crossroads of new places (city) which they are going to visit. In addition to the mentioned group of users, target audience might be extended with children of school and even under-school age. It would be possible to develop study content for pedestrians as well. Thus, children will have a possibility to study passage of the crossroads relevant to them (crossroads of the neighborhood, crossroads on the way to the school, etc.).

Domain Expert(Driving school instructor)

Mobile and Web Study Content

Mashup-based Domain Specific Content Creation Toolset

Traffic and road related information

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Map Service providers

Figure 1. Mashup-based study content creation.

3. PERSONAL STUDY ADVISER

3.1 Assisted consumption of Technology World

We cannot avoid the fact of an extreme technology growth. Every day huge amount of information, knowledge and capabilities appear and populate our Technology World (TW). People have pretty clear understanding that all the efforts we put towards TW growth are aimed to increase the benefits of the human. But, are we satisfied with the result so far? Very often people become under the stress, angry, mad and unsatisfied when they cannot get appropriate support from TW, solving their everyday life problems. Appearance of the new technologies requires huge efforts from the human to adapt and become a fully fledged and experienced user of them. Nowadays, TW with all its information, services and features, stepped over the threshold and made the human unable to follow and utilize all this amount of new capabilities and data. It becomes impossible for the human to find and access appropriate information/capability when it is really needed, especially in situations created by TW. It looks like the technology become a “master” of the human. We have reached a point when we have to change this statement. We have to make TW smart enough to be able to deliver, to bring itself to the human/user and become a “servant” back.

We missed a very important and essential part of the whole idea, we missed a channel through which TW become available, understood and simply used for the human. TW produces huge amount and variety of information, technological capabilities and knowledge that might be very useful and helpful for the human. But, the human is lacking for information about services and capabilities that TW may offer to him and knowledge about the way they might be utilized. If the human cannot approach TW, let us make TW capable to approach the human. We should bring intelligent capabilities to TW to make it able to teach the human to use available achievement of this World. We should change the formed perception and attitude towards TW, should make information and capabilities seeking for a user/customer and pushed in an appropriate moment. Only the relevant information and capabilities should be advertised and pushed when it is needed, depending on correspondent human goals and context. All other time, TW should be invisible for the human, should trace human activities and build personalized information/capability space at the background. Here, personalization concerns not only context-dependent relevant information and capability filtering, but also the way how information and services are presented to the user/human to be understood by him/her.

3.2 Personal Study Adviser

3.2.1 Education decision support service

We are surrounded by data – data about events, our daily activities, a multitude of products and services from different vendors, low and various restrictions applied to us in different contexts, etc. This data plays a crucial role in our live when it is available and helping us to make better decisions. Increasing numbers of individuals and organizations are contributing to this huge information flow by sharing their data with others, including Web-native companies (such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and other social networks, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), newspapers, public governmental bodies, various research initiatives and etc. In turn, third parties are consuming this data to build new businesses, provide new services and accelerate scientific progress. In this context, education domain does not stay apart. Surrounding information influence on education process meanwhile education process contributes to the surrounding information flow.

It is not a secret that many of young school-leavers face difficulties to decide what king of education to choose after the school, which subject to select, what courses to put to the personal study plan, etc. Flexible education system offers quite many options to choose. There are a lot of factors that influence on the decision and it is not easy to make right choice without comprehensive analysis of labor market and developing trends inside a country and worldwide. Unfortunately, only small amount of people really have a freedom to choose future profession having stable support from family, own business, government, etc. Usually, people have to be competitive enough to survive, especially in critical crisis time. Our tough world dictates own demands and sets conditions. People should be able to recognize the trends and be able to follow changes of the law, governmental regulations, labor market conditions, etc. to become competitive in the future. Meanwhile, not only school-leavers have such a need. Many people, who would like to improve and extend his/her skills, who would like to increase the level of own qualification, might pay attention to these issues. To fill up the

gap between the human and TW, and help people to consume and get benefit of it, we need a platform of ubiquitous personalized decision support services in education domain. Enriched with various supportive services, platform should play a role of personalized Study Advisor for everyone who would like to build his/her personal education process, who would like to improve and extend own skills. Meanwhile, platform should support education content providers to follow development trends in education domain and be aware about relevant changes on a labor market, about demands of industry and businesses, and preferences of potential customers (students), etc. To increase competitiveness of education services and, as a consequence, to increase their quality, platform might be enriched with quality assurance support service. Thus, we need a trustful user-oriented education environment with decision support and quality assurance services.

3.2.2 Challenges and features of the decision support platform

Semantic Web is advocated approach to provide interoperability between heterogeneous systems, especially when we deal with integration of the systems or content that will appear in the future. This approach is perfect to be utilized for machine-to-machine communication in TW (Khriyenko O. and Nagy M, 2011) (Kaykova et. al, 2007). Human is an integral part of the World, it is user and service provider at the same time. But, in case of the human, the process of human integration is not so evident. To be interoperable with other players of TW, human should share common information model and model of knowledge representation and the World perception. We cannot demand from the human to study and adapt to variety of existing models in TW. Each person is individual and unique. Therefore, to be servant for the users – not the master, TW should adapt itself taking human individuality into account. Thus, one of the very important capabilities of TW might be a Personal Assistant (PA) assigned to each user – the supportive guide to the TW, personal window to the World of Services. From one side, PA should deal with user personality and adapts to the user personal ontology and personal perception of the environment. From another side, to be a bridge to the surrounding TW, Assistant should support common semantic standards and approach to be interoperable with digital world of other services (Figure 2). PA becomes a very useful tool that makes complexity of the TW hidden and transparent for the human. It plays a role of personalized single entry point to the huge variety of heterogeneous services. Such capability of TW may pretty much increase ability of the human to consume offered services. But, still, the main problem for the human remains uncovered. Problems related to retrieval of relevant information, data and services and integration of it in particular contexts remain crucial even for quite experienced users with good service consuming skills. To address these problems, we consider a context-aware data and knowledge browsing system that provides common entry point to information and, enhanced with personal ontology adaptation and semantic search engine, play a role of a personalized semantic desktop for the user. Semantic similarity search engine of the browser will enable user- and/or context-driven search and filtering of the data for smooth visualization and will allow user to obtain personalized integrated study content. Such semantically linked data browser will enable semantic MashUps/MeshUps, adaptive and context-sensitive visualization of original data and seamless navigation through explicit and hidden semantic links on top of it.

Another crucial issue that accompanies mentioned problem is trust to the information and data sources as well as trust to the services that human utilize. To tackle this problem we consider elaboration of a Personal Information/Data/Service Space concept as a part of PA (Figure 2). Through intelligent managing mechanism, every user will build own space of trusted information/data sources and services. Flexible

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Various HeterogeneousData Sources

Common , integrated, uniform… Linked Data

Semantic Search

Distributed Querying

Knowledge Extraction

Semantic BrowsingSemantic

Data SourceOntologyStorageManager

Infrastructure tools and services

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Data Space Data SpaceData Space

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Linked Data Network

Figure 2. Personal Semantic Information Space.

management system of personal information space will allow user to feed it with trustful data sources and define context dependent relevance of them. Space management system should be able to retrieve relevant data and suggest relevant sources and information based on user profile, points of interest, gained experience and other contextual information. On top of such a space, PA will have a duty of more efficient information/data processing by operating with heterogeneous sources, by intelligent querying, integration, annotation and visualization of information. Advanced machine learning algorithms could teach the PA based on user behavior. In such a way, PA may transfer personalized knowledge from the human and become a really personalized decision support system.

If we are aiming to intelligent use of information from different data sources, to intelligent management of knowledge extracted from a network of distributed education related information providers, and etc., we have to make the data linked. Data should be accessible in common uniform way from common virtual semantic data space of linked data, even if originally it is located in different data sources. Semantic representation of linked data will make data dynamically accessible by proactive software and automatically transformable to appropriate formats for further utilization. Supported by toolset for linked data creation (adding semantic layer on top of heterogeneous data formats), PA will support a user to better understand semantics of the data, combine relevant semantically annotated pieces of study content (video, audio, text, presentations, etc.) and build personalized course. At the same time, it might be used for collaborative study content annotation to enhance the search engine in a context of personalized users’ ontologies.

4. CONCLUSION

With the growing availability of Web and mobile technologies, on-line learning environments will need, increasingly, to encompass ubiquitous learning facilities. In this paper authors tackled some bottlenecks that slow-down consumption of technological achievements that might be applicable in education domain. Collaborative mashup-based study content creation services was considered as a use case for innovative content development for auto schools. Paper also has touched the issue of human decision support system in a context of personalized education process. Being connected to the different education content providers (universities, conference organizations, governmental innovation institutions, exhibition halls, various e-learning content repositories, etc.); Study Advisor might suggest new relevant content and events (courses, e-learning materials, visiting lectures, seminars, forums, conferences, exhibitions, etc.). The same platform/service might be very useful for universities as well. In the same way, based on relevant information about changes on a labor market, announcements from the companies, world trends in education process, preferences of potential students, etc., it might lead to creation or support modification of new study plans and course contents that are highly relevant to the called-for competence.

REFERENCES

Casey, D. and Fraser, J., 2010. “A Framework for Developing and Implementing u-Learning Models”. In Handbook of Research on Human Performance and Instructional Technology, 12 pp., ISBN13: 9781605667829.

Kaykova, O., Khriyenko, O., Kovtun, D., Naumenko, A., Terziyan, V., Zharko, A., Challenges of General Adaptation Framework for Industrial Semantic Web , In: Amit Sheth and Miltiadis Lytras (eds.), Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art Applications, CyberTech Publishing, 2007, pp. 61-97

Khriyenko, O. and Nagy, M., 2011. “ Semantic Web-driven Agent-based Ecosystem for Linked Data and Services”, In: Proceedings of the Third International Conferences on Advanced Service Computing, 25-30 September, 2011, Rome, Italy, 8 pp

Luukka, M., Pöyhönen, S., Huhta, A., Taalas P. and Tarnanen, M., 2008. “The world is changing – what makes a school? Native and foreign-language text of the practices at school and during leisure time”. University of Jyväskylä: Centre for Applied Language Studies.

Maximilien, EM., Ranabahu, A., and Gomadam, K., 2008. “An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups”. In IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 32-43.

Traxler, J., 2007. “Defining, Discussing and Evaluating Mobile Learning: the moving finger writes and having writ ...”, In the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).