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The paper describes the concept of a federated ecosystem for Open Educational Resources (OER) in the German education system. Here, a variety of OER repositories (ROER) (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms have been established in the recent past. In order to develop this ecosystem, not only are metadata standards necessary, but also open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are required in order to exchange information. In conclusion, it is essential that all relevant stakeholders agree on an explicit policy to be developed collaboratively. A metadata exchange service can serve to connect all partners.

In today's teaching and learning approaches for first-semester students, practical courses more and more often complement traditional theoretical lectures. This practical element allows an early insight into the real world of engineering, augments student motivation, and enables students to acquire soft skills early. This paper describes a new freshman introduction course into practical engineering, which has been established within the Bachelor of Science curriculum of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of RWTH Aachen University, Germany. The course is organized as an eight-day, full-time block laboratory for over 300 freshman students, who were supervised by more than 60 tutors from 23 institutes of the Electrical Engineering Department. Based on a threefold learning concept comprising mathematical methods, MATLAB programming, and practical engineering, the students were required to transfer mathematical basics to algorithms in MATLAB in order to control LEGO Mindstorms robots. Toward this end, a new toolbox, called the "RWTH-Mindstorms NXT Toolbox," was developed, which enables the robots to be controlled remotely via MATLAB from a host computer. This paper describes how the laboratory course is organized and how it induces students to think as actual engineers would in solving real-world tasks with limited resources. Evaluation results show that the project improves the students' MATLAB programming skills, enhances motivation, and enables a peer learning process. (Contains 15 figures.)

Purpose: Social navigation is an emerging trend for navigation in hypermedia. With social navigation, users can be guided through large volumes of learning content by cues which integrate the browsing history of past users. Earlier papers have shown that social navigation is suitable for navigation not only in classic hypermedia but also in time-based learning media like web lectures by presenting prototype implementations. The purpose of this paper is to report on user experiences with social navigation for web lectures in the classroom. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents results obtained from a two-term classroom study with a social navigation interface for web lectures. The study comprises both log file analysis and student questionnaires. The interface used in the study implements a footprint-based social navigation approach for time-based continuous media such as web lectures. Findings: The results of the user study show that social navigation cues significantly affect user lecture navigation, causing users to pay more attention to the material previously explored by other users. The users' subjective feedback on the usefulness of the social navigation cues and related navigation components was significantly positive. Originality/value: Social navigation has primarily been implemented and researched in traditional text- and picture-based hypermedia. This paper presents an actual user study of footprint-based social navigation for web lectures. The results of this study are relevant to both practitioners who want to use social navigation in web lectures and researchers who want to improve and research navigation approaches for time-based media. (Contains 6 figures and 4 tables.)

Purpose: At many universities, web lectures have become an integral part of the e-learning portfolio over the last few years. While many aspects of the technology involved, like automatic recording techniques or innovative interfaces for replay, have evolved at a rapid pace, web lecturing has remained independent of other important developments such as Web 2.0. The aim of this paper is to exemplify and discuss the benefits web lecturing can gain from a Web 2.0 perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes an implementation of three Web 2.0 features for the virtPresenter web lecture interface. These are time-based social footprints, a mechanism for linking to user created bookmarks in a web lecture from external Web 2.0 applications and a special web lecture player that enables users to embed their own web lecture bookmarks in wikis or blogs. Findings: The paper shows how conceptual and technical obstacles in bringing Web 2.0 features like social footprints to web lectures can be overcome. It also makes evident that linking web lectures in Web 2.0 systems require special adaptations due to the time-based nature of web lectures. The technical discussion shows that many Web 2.0 features require feedback channels in order to communicate information back to servers (e.g. to understand how the content is used) and that most contemporary media players have to be modified in order to support feedback channels. Practical implications: The paper shows that web lectures can benefit from Web 2.0 ideas and presents examples how Web 2.0 and web lectures can be brought together. Originality/value: Web 2.0 is a popular trend that transforms the way in which the internet is used. This paper shows how web lectures can be enriched with Web 2.0 features and how they can be integrated with Web 2.0 systems by discussing three implementation examples.

This paper compares several interface evaluation methods applied in the case of a computer based learning (CBL) environment, during a longitudinal study performed in three European countries, Greece, Germany, and Holland, and within the framework of an EC funded Leonardo da Vinci program. The paper firstly considers the particularities of the CBL environments presented in comparison to Distance Learning environments, as well as other educational pieces. Subsequently, the software under evaluation is described, as well as the underlying educational theories and the proposed instructional methodology regarding its effective application. In the case under study, a combination of expert-based and empirical (user-based) approaches are dealt with, and the ''ideal'' combination, for the consumption of the fewest possible resources in order to achieve the maximum outcome for the assessment of the software is investigated. A combinatory evaluation approach is argued for the provision of the best results in the case of complex environments such as educational ones. The results of this study show that both approaches, expert-based and empirical, have been found to perform adequately, although the empirical methodologies are always preferable. Therefore, this study concludes by proposing a combination of an expert-based approach during the early stages of the design cycle with an observational evaluation, performed by the instructors and/or the designers, which has to provide the best cost/performance factor.

Learning Analytics can provide powerful tools for teachers in order to support them in the iterative process of improving the effectiveness of their courses and to collaterally enhance their students' performance. In this paper, we present the theoretical background, design, implementation, and evaluation details of eLAT, a Learning Analytics Toolkit, which enables teachers to explore and correlate learning object usage, user properties, user behavior, as well as assessment results based on graphical indicators. The primary aim of the development of eLAT is to process large data sets in microseconds with regard to individual data analysis interests of teachers and data privacy issues, in order to help them to self-reflect on their technology-enhanced teaching and learning scenarios and to identify opportunities for interventions and improvements. (Contains 9 figures.)

Purpose: Linking Open Data (LOD) provides a vast amount of well structured semantic information, but many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data cleansing approaches enable detection of inconsistencies and overhauling of affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply automatically. The purpose of this paper is to present WhoKnows?, an online quiz that generates different kinds of questionnaires from DBpedia data sets. Design/methodology/approach: Besides its playfulness, WhoKnows? has been developed for the evaluation of property relevance ranking heuristics on DBpedia data, with the convenient side effect of detecting inconsistencies and doubtful facts. Findings: The original purpose for developing WhoKnows? was to evaluate heuristics to rank LOD properties and thus, obtain a semantic relatedness between entities according to the properties by which they are linked. The presented approach is an efficient method to detect popular properties within a limited amount of triples. Ongoing work continues in the development of sound property ranking heuristics for the purpose of detecting the most relevant characteristics of entities. Originality/value: WhoKnows? uses the approach of "Games with a Purpose" to detect inconsistencies in Linked Data and score properties to rank them for sophisticated semantic search scenarios. (Contains 13 notes, 2 tables and 2 figures.)

An important issue of the demographic change in the German population is the maintenance and promotion of the employability of aging workforces. However, there are hardly any suitable concepts or usable tools available to realize this goal. Possible approaches should push the individual strengths of the aging workers to the foreground and intercept the possible physical and cognitive losses in ability that occur with an increase in age. The computer thus plays an important role due to a continuous increase in mechanization. An age-based, individual adaptive user interface shall be developed to support the elderly in working with the computer. Basics for such an interface will be presented in this paper. First connections between user characteristics and adaptation dimensions were analyzed in a study with 90 subjects ranging from 20 to 73 years of age and will be presented in this article. Results indicate a significant influence of graphical layout on memorization as well as interpretation performance. (Contains 4 figures.)