IDENTITY Individualized Learning Enhanced by Virtual Reality

1. IDENTITY Individualized Learning Enhanced by Virtual Reality Metadata for Online Experiments DIBE’s point of view Anna Marina Scapolla Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering scapolla@unige.it LisbonMarch 19-22, 2007

2. Outline • The project targets • Toward the integration of virtual experiments with LMSs • Metadata for Online Experiments • The ISILab approach • The PROLEARN approach • Conclusions

3. The project targets • A structured, standard compliant and expandable repository of learning resources to support the use of VR applications • One common format to describe simulated and remote experiments and to ease the integration of experiments with the offer of standard e-learning platforms.

4. Steps toward the integration of virtual experiments with LMSs • Using Metadata to describe virtual experiments • Accessing the status of online experiments • Running online experiments • Viewing the results synchronously and asynchronously • Matching authorization and accounting of different systems (LMSs and laboratory environments)

5. Metadata for Online Experiments Two approaches have been considered: • ISILab (the remote laboratory on electronics of DIBE) • The PROLEARN Network of Excellence in Professional Learning (area of IST/Technology Enhanced Learning within the European Union 6th research framework)

6. ISILab Each experiment is described by an XML file that contains: • Metadata to catalog the experiment as a pedagogical resource, based on the IEEE LOM standard • Data used by the laboratory engine to work properly (i.e. declaration of the instruments and the virtual interfaces used to run the experiment)

7. ISILab Metadata

8. ISILab Metadata (2)

9. ISILab Metadata (3)

10. ISILab - Authoring Metadata

11. PROLEARN PROLEARN has a specific work package on the subject “Online experiments”. Targets: • to define a common description for online experiments • to develop an online repository of experiment descriptions, which will allow educators, experiment developers and educational researchers to locate online experiments of interest. What has been done: • extension of the metadata schema adopted by EducaNext (http://www.educanext.org) • Collection of the available experiments in this repository

12. PROLEARN (2) The extension of the metadata schema adopted by EducaNext introduces the following fields: • Experiment Components (virtual, remote, local) • Number of setups: • Number of active users per setup, • Number of passive users per setup, • Allocation policy • Supported interaction modes (Synchronous, Asynchronous) • Availability (Continuously, Planned time period, Upon request, Not available) • Reservation (Online reservation, Link to online reservation system, Offline reservation at contact person, Stand in queue, Direct access) • Guest access

13. EducaNext portal: panel specific to online experiments

14. PROLEARN RESULTS About 60 resources catalogued. most of them are descriptions of remote laboratories or practice tools more than descriptions of single experiments A relevant contribution to specifying the characteristics of this special kind of learning objects. Reliability of such information? Online experiment are not contents in digital format, stored in a repository, but resources made available by network servers that manage complex hardware and software systems.

15. Conclusions The IEEE LOM standard allows defining the attributes to fully describe online experiments and to enable learners or instructors to search and to evaluate this special kind of learning resources. The extensions, suggested by Prolearn, help to qualify these resources more precisely, but sharing and exchanging them across learning systems should be further investigated.