A Virtual Organisation for eLearning

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• A Virtual Organisation for e-Learning
• Nicola Capuano, Pierre Carrolaggi, Jerome Combaz,
  Fabio Crestani, Matteo Gaeta, Erich Herber, Enver
  Sangineto, Krassen Stefanov Mikel Vergara

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Presentation Overview

• Diogene a system based on Virtual Organization
• The different types of users
• The system organizations
• Conclusions

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The Diogenes system

• Diogene is an European funded project
  (IST-2001-33358)
• The objective is an e-learning system for
  automatic course generation and customization
  exploiting Semantic Web capabilities.
• The systems architecture is based on a
  distributed and cooperating Virtual Organization

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Virtual Organization

• A Virtual Organization (VO) can be defined as a
  coordinated group of individuals and/or
  institutions who collaborate for a common
  interest (a business goal) and share, on the
  basis of some policies, a set of resources
  (processors, instruments, data and services).

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The Diogenes Virtual Organization

• The Diogenes Virtual Organization is composed of
  entities offering and consuming services
• Such entities are grouped into two main
  categories users and organizations

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Different types of users

• Learner is a student registered in the Diogene
  VO
• Expert Learner is a Learner skilled about some
  topics. He/she offers mentoring support to other
  learners about such topics, usually for free
• Freelance Tutor is a professional teacher
  offering mentoring support to learners about
  specific topics under the payment of some price
• Skill Searcher is an enterprise manager
  interested in hiring certified staff. He/she
  performs queries on skill repositories

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Organizations

• The Diogenes Organizations are software
  components which automatically provide learning
  services
• Each Organization is realized as a Web Service

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The systems Organizations

• Organizations for the content storage
• Publishing Houses (PH). They store Learning
  Objects indexed by means of Metadata and provide
  remote access to them
• Web Catcher Agencies (WA). They are able to
  extract training content directly from Web and
  Semantic Web

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The systems Organizations

• Organizations for automatic course
  generation/personalization
• Training Agencies (TA). They are the entry points
  of learners to the VO. They accept the users
  queries, are responsible of course delivering and
  interact with the other organizations

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• Knowledge Agencies (KA). They maintain and manage
  knowledge structures (concept dictionaries and
  ontologies) for the whole Diogene Network. It is
  a singleton organization. It receives the users
  training query by the TA and generates the
  structure of the course (Learning Path) using the
  abstract knowledge on the didactic domain
  described by its domain ontology

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• Brokerage Offices (BO). They personalize the
  Learning Path received by the KA using the
  Learning Objects received by either the PHs or
  the WAs

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The systems Organizations

• Other Organizations
• Tutor Agencies (TG). They work as entry point
  for freelance tutors, they manage the freelance
  tutor archive (containing tutor models) and
  provide searching facilities on such archive
• Skill Agencies (SA). They provide search engine
  capabilities on the Learner Models Databases in
  order to allow third parties interested to hire
  certified staff to find qualified learners

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• Café (CA). They support social interactions,
  mentoring and information exchange by providing
  users a set of collaborative synchronous and
  asynchronous facilities. They can also
  automatically cluster learners with respect to
  possible similar needs and/or profiles
• Bank (BA). Its a singleton organization which
  executes and logs transactions information
  occurred inside the Diogene VO. It interacts with
  an e-commerce engine to execute transactions
  involving real payment processes

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An example of Diogene Virtual Organization
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Conlusions

• We have presented a distributed e-learning system
  developed during the European funded project
  Diogene
• Diogene is based on a network of independent
  organizations each of which realized as a Web
  Service.
• These agencies provide several e-learning and
  related facilities, such as course delivering,
  course generation and customization, free
  document retrieval and categotization on the Web
  and on the Semantic Web, Learning Objects
  repositories based on a metadata indexing, human
  tutor support and external skill search.

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Conclusions

• Eight courses have been adapted from existing
  traditional courses splitting them in different
  Learning Objects and indexed using Semantic Web
  standards
• Finally, the project has been evaluated using 170
  users of various types (learners, tutors, ...)
  with very encouraging results