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• 1 2023-01-04T08:02:48+00:00 X5GON 1 Searching the web for open educational resources plain 2023-01-04T08:02:48+00:00

  Searching for educational resources is an important activity for teachers: when preparing a new lecture, exploring a new field or subject, or preparing some activity. This material (courseware) can be just for documentation, but sometimes the teacher might want to build new courseware from it; And it is tempting and intellectually legitimate to not reinvent the wheel and to use an intelligent form of copy-paste. Of course this is usually not legal in most countries as it breaks copyright laws.
  
  When the authors of the resources license their work with Creative Common licenses, the resources become Open Educational Resources and the teacher can reuse, transform, remix and redistribute them freely. The only obligation, usually, is to quote the original author correctly. It is therefore important to identify when a resource is open or not.
  
  There are some collections of well licensed open educational resources and your ministry probably has one. But what about finding these resources anywhere on the web? Can we make use of a specific search engine for this?
  Project X5-GON was funded by the European Union to find and index OER, to use artificial intelligence to curate these OER and propose AI tools, typically search tools, allowing users to better find OER.
  
  Where does the AI appear in such a process? It will appear in all stages:
  
  During the ingestion stage, robots will scrap the web and return OER: this is a complex process as it means recognizing the OER and therefore the licenses. Part of it can be seen as a typical classification task (a common AI task).
  When the robot has found a resource, the text from this resource has to be recovered. When the resource is an audio or a video file, this means using transcription (more about this in Chapter 7).
  
  The 5 in X5-GON refers to the 5 barriers or dimensions the project wished to address: one of these being language. So the next step of the process is to use automatic translation tools to obtain text versions in each of the chosen languages. Again a typical AI tool.
  
  At this point you may wonder: Automatic transcription and translation are fast growing technologies. But they still make serious mistakes. Isn’t it dangerous to rely on these? The answer is that search and recommendation algorithms don’t need the exact text. They need to position the document in a space; next to keywords, to other documents. 
  
  Think about when you have a box full of old papers that you need to organize. Ideally you would want to have a preset organization and file each paper in the right place. But we usually don’t have this pre-existing filing system and end up putting the papers close to each other when they have things in common, with unwritten rules of all sorts: these two papers go together because they are from the same year, these two because they are related to cars, these two because they have the same size, and so forth…The key term here is “next to”: we will discuss this later in the book.
  
  Once raw texts have been extracted, models can be built.Documents will become vectors in some high dimensional space and comparing vectors will allow us to answer the questions: which are the 10 documents most similar to this one? Which are the 5 documents which best match this keyword?
  
  Richer models can be obtained through training. They can answer more complex questions:

  • How difficult is this course? The answer can perhaps be somewhere in the course description, or in the meta-data, the data hidden to the viewer but which are supposed to give information about a document. More likely, they can be obtained through automatically analysing the document: the lengths of the sentences and the words, the words themselves are strong indicators of the age for which a course was intended
  • Should I look at this courseware before this other one? This is the prequel to be able to have a full course built automatically from given courseware.
  • What is the quality of the course? This is for AI the difficult question. It is also possibly a wrong question where AI can do more harm than good. Nevertheless, being able to find out if the facts in a course are correct makes a lot of sense. After the fake news, will we have fake courses?

  
  Some links
  X5-Discover (https://discovery.x5gon.org/) is a search engine
  The learning platform X5-Learn (http://x5learn.org/) allows to choose one's courseware and get the AI to organize it in the best order. In this case, a recommendation engine is used.
  More X5-GON tools (an API for developers, a version to be installed in Moodle) can be found here.
  
  The X5GON project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant No 761758