Presentation given at the 3rd Conference on Effective Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the American University of Beirut.

1. ENHANCING STUDENT ACCESS TO
UNIVERSITY CONTENT THROUGH
SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES
Fouad Zablith
Olayan School of Business
American University of Beirut

2. Information is Scattered & Growing
What are the courses offered
In Decision Systems this spring?

3. Information is Scattered & Growing
What are the courses offered
In Decision Systems this spring?
What are the relevant learning
Material to this course?

4. Information is Scattered & Growing
What are the courses offered
In Decision Systems this spring?
What are the relevant learning
Material to this course?
What are the office hours of my
instructor?

5. Registrar Student’s Communications Digital
Department Repository
Library Moodle Student
Services Online
Media

6. Registrar Student’s Communications Digital
Department Repository
Library Moodle Student
Services Online
Media
?

7. Problem
• Big universities and organizations store their information
in different systems relevant to their departments
• Each system has its own platform, and grows with time to
form an information silo, disconnected from other
information repositories
• This will make it hard for students, the main consumers of
university information, to get answers to their queries in
an efficient way

8. Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
From searching for
“Terms”, to searching
for “Things”

9. Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
Learning on the fly with
augmented reality

10. Technology is Getting More Sophisticated
Learning physics while
travelling around Europe
+ explosion in online
learning material

11. Students’ Expectations are Changing
• Today, students tend to expect more from technology, as it
is offering them more sophisticated tools
• They expect when they check their mobile phones, to
know at a glance where their friends are at the moment
• They expect to know what happened in class from their
moodle page, and ask questions through moodle
• They expect to go online to search for learning concepts
they didn’t understand in class

12. How can we, as a university, meet
students’ expectations to enhance the
discovery of our content?

13. Proposed Solution
• We propose a solution based on the following two main
components:
• A linked platform of university content
• A processable and explicit student context
• The role of the two components is to enable the
adaptation of university content to the students’ needs
based on their contexts
• We propose relying on semantic technologies to provide
the two components

14. Requirements
• To achieve our objective, we foresee the following
requirements:
• A methodology to extract and connect existing university
information resources
• A set of tools to elicit the context of students in a processable
manner
• Devise the appropriate means to adapt university content to the
student needs in different channels

15. Linking Resources
• Linking is important, we have tutorials on that! Can we
make such links more explicit and reusable?

16. Semantic Technologies and Linked Data
• Linking data within an organization enables breaking the
isolation of data silos
• The semantic web and linked data provide the means to
connect entities at the data level using meaningful
relations and unique references
• Such entities are linked and published following well
defined vocabularies, to make seamless exchange of data
within the university and external resources

17. Example
Student Course
isa isa
enrolledIn Management
Jim
215

18. A Linked University Platform

19. Linking Across the University
Course

20. Linking Across the University
Course hasTitle
Title
isToughtBy
hasMaterial
Slides
Instructor
Book

21. Linking Across the University
Course hasTitle
Title
isToughtBy
hasMaterial
Slides
Instructor
isPartOf hasPublication Book
hasISBN hasSupplier
Department
Publication ISBN
Supplier

22. Linking Across the University
Course
and beyond…
hasTitle
Title
isToughtBy
hasMaterial
Slides
Instructor
isPartOf hasPublication Book
hasISBN hasSupplier
Department
Publication ISBN
Supplier

23. Governments
Universities
Bibliography
References
And many more!
“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

24. Moving from Silos to Linked Data

25. Linked Data Lucero Statistics
Entity Type Number of Instances
Courses 580
Research Publications 16,000
Video Podcasts 2,200
Audio Podcasts 1,500
Open Educational Resources 640
YouTube Videos 900
University Buildings 100
Library Catalogue Books 12,000

26. Library
Publications Podcasts
Catalogue
Courses
YouTube People
Information
Linked Data
Platform

27. Linking Learning Material
Application that enables
students to discover
various learning material
from the same page
Podcasts, open material
and courses were never
connected, but now they
are!

28. New Learning Channels
With the ease of access to information, creative things could be
done with learning material.

29. Student Context for Content Adaptation

30. Potential Student Context Sources
• Student contexts can potentially be aggregated from
different sources such as:
• Existing student records
• Social networks
• Manually updated profiles/preferences
• Historical user context activities
• Physical devices (e.g. location enabled mobile phones)

31. Student Context Mockup
Student
Jim
completed
enrolledIn interestedIn
English MNGT
Running
203 215
Chess

32. Student Assistant Mockup
MNGT
210
Office hours: Program
OSB
OSB 456
Student
MWF: 3-4pm
AUB
Jim
Beirut Marathon
pleted
enrolledIn interestedIn 11 Nov 2012
Person Events
MNGT
Running Book
215 You have to take
Chess MNGT 210 next spring
Hagop Run
New chess book AUBRun
at AUB library
Linked University
Student Context
Content

33. More Flexible Queries
Are there any
Engineering related
events at AUB?

34. More Flexible Queries
Are there any
Engineering related What are the cases related
events at AUB? to Management 215?

35. More Flexible Queries
What are the student
job vacancies
available?
Are there any
Engineering related What are the cases related
events at AUB? to Management 215?

36. Challenges
• Student contexts can contain private information, hence
students should have full control on what to expose
• Some information are harder to represent than others for
example courses information vs degree requirements
• Another challenge is at the level of the student
acceptance of such technology
• How to manage the increase in the context history to keep
relevant information to the student

37. Conclusion
• Semantic technologies enable having a linked and
processable information layer in big organizations and
universities
• A semantic student context was proposed to enable
adapting university content to students’ preferences, and
enhancing the discovery of new content
• Our next step is to start linking content at AUB, and
evaluate the effect of the proposed context aware
application on:
• The efficiency in content discovery
• The student learning experience

38. Thank you
http://fouad.zablith.org
fouad.zablith@aub.edu.lb
@fzablith

39. Image Sources
• http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-sense-of-
place-a-world-of-augmented-reality-part-2/13628/
• http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ph100/CourseRe
v/1
• http://openclipart.org/detail/79363