LinkedUp: Linking Open Data for Education

4 February 2014 - 2:12pm

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Marieke Guy, Mathieu d’Aquin,Stefan Dietze, Hendrik Drachsler,Eelco Herder and Elisabetta Parodidescribe the activities carried out by the LinkedUp Project looking at the promotion of open data in education.

Table of Contents [hide]

1. Open and Linked Web Data
2. Open and Linked Data in UK Higher Education
3. The LinkedUp Challenge
4. Evaluation Framework
5. Use Cases
6. Data Catalogue
7. Open Education Network
8. Conclusions
9. References
10. Author Details

In the past, discussions around Open Education have tended to focus on content and primarily Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, assessment and research purposes. However Open Education is a complex beast made up of many aspects, of which the opening up of data is one important element.

When one mentions open data in education a multitude of questions arise: from the technical (what is open data? What is linked data? How do I create open datasets?), the semantic (what is the difference between Open Education data and open data in education?) to the more philosophical (what exactly is Open Education anyway? How can we make sure ‘open’ means ‘accessible to all’? How can opening up data be helpful?) All valid questions, yet not all with straight-forward answers; however exploration around what might purport to be answers to these questions is very much in scope for the LinkedUp Project.

The LinkedUp Project (Linking Web data for education) [1] is an EU FP7 Coordination and Support Action running from November 2012 to November 2014 which looks at issues around open data in education, with the aim of pushing forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web. It aspires to do this by facilitating developer competitions and deploying an evaluation framework, which identifies innovative success stories of robust, Web-scale information management applications. The project comprises six pan-European consortium partners [2] led by the L3S Research Center of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover and consisting of the Open University UK, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Elsevier, the Open Universiteit Nederland and eXact learning LCMS. The project also has a number of associated partners [3] with an interest in the project including the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada and the Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio, Brazil.

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue72/guy-et-al