Activities / Project updates

Research and development in the OP4L project is conducted in several inter-related directions:

  • Study of the concept of online presence, especially in the context of online learning environments  [Stankovic, 2009].
  • Study of pedagogical issues underlying PLEs, in particular: interactivity, social learning, collaboration, learners’ autonomy, and self-regulation.
  • Development of ICT models that raise learners’ awareness of each other’s (online) presence in online collaborative learning [Jovanovic et al, 2009]. By being aware of a learner’s online presence, a learning system can adapt the learner’s interactions with his/her online social environment (i.e. other learners and teachers) better.
  • Learning context modeling. Learning context is about the environment, tools, resources, people (in terms of social networking), and learning activities [Jovanovic et al, 2007]. In OP4l, this notion of learning context is extended with the notion of online presence.
  • Recommendation of relevant learning resources. Context-aware and online-presence-aware recommendation of relevant learning resources (both digital and human) is the major practical focus of OP4L. To this end, the project develops and demonstrates the use of specific algorithms for context-aware recommendation of learning resources. A specific PLE, called DEPTHS [Jeremic et al, 2009], developed for collaborative learning of software design patterns, is extended with the notion of online presence and is used to demonstrate how taking into account the learners' online presence helps in several learning scenarios when collaboration options would otherwise be greatly reduced.

[Stankovic, 2009]  Stankovic, M. “Faceted Online Presence – A Semantic Web Approach”, Master’s Thesis. Université Paris-Sud XI, Orsay, France. [Jovanovic et al, 2009]  Jovanović, J., Gašević, D., Stanković, M., Jeremić, Z., Siadaty, M., "Online Presence in Adaptive Learning on the Social Semantic Web," In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Social Computing - Workshops (Workshop on Social Computing in Education), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2009, pp. 891-896. [Jovanovic et al, 2007]  Jovanovic J., Knight C., Gasevic D., Richards G. (2007). Ontologies for Effective Use of Context in e-Learning Settings. Educa-tional Technology & Society, 10(3), 47-59. [Jeremic et al, 2009]  Jeremić, Z., Jovanović, J., Gašević, D. “Project-based Collaborative Learning Environment with Context-aware Educational Services”, In Proceedings of Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 2009), Nice, France, September 29th – October 2nd 2009, pp. 441-446.