NSDL: Towards Reusable and Shareable Courseware: Topic Maps-Based Digital Libraries

Winston-Salem State University, Winston Salem NC

Investigators

Abstract

The effectiveness of instructors and efficiency of learners engaged in open-learning and teaching tasks in Web-based course support environments depend crucially on the support they receive: for learners in retrieving relevant information to perform their learning tasks and for instructors in creating and maintaining online teaching and learning material. Two groups of related problems concern correspondingly findability of learning resources and reusability and shareability of digital educational repositories. A solution to these problems is only viable if the digital content of the repositories is standards-based. Standardization of e-learning repositories should be addressed not only from a technological perspective but also from a knowledge perspective. This project provides a path to better understanding and solving some problems related to efficient retrieval, sharing, reuse, and interchange of discipline-specific repositories of learning objects on the Web. An in-depth analysis of the application of the new ISO standard, Topic Maps, within the framework of NSDL reveals how it compares to other Semantic Web solutions along similar dimensions. The concept-based architecture of digital course libraries provides grounds for efficient context-based retrieval of learning resources as well as for deeper understanding of the ontological structure of the specific subject domain. The topic maps-based implementation of the architecture provides a unifying framework for standards-based knowledge and information representation and management, which implies reusability, shareability, and interoperability of the learning content. The developed environment for supporting ontology-aware digital course libraries offers an alternative solution to courseware authors and users, which in some cases could meet better their needs. This project impacts Web-based educational systems and digital libraries communities including designers, developers, and users (instructors, authors) of such systems, and through them on learners involved in various forms of education - formal, informal, and lifelong learning. It promotes the use of the new ISO standard Topic Maps for educational purposes and provides insight about the role that ontologies can play in digital libraries and instructional technology. This software tool improves the performance effectiveness of both learners and instructors in Web-based learning support environments.