TrAgLor: A LOM Based Digital Learning Objects Repository for Agriculture

1. TrAgLor: A LOM Based Digital Learning Objects Repository for Agriculture Zeynel Cebeci, Yoldaş Erdoğan, Murat Kara Çukurova University Faculty of Agriculture, Div. of Biometry & Genetics 01330 Adana, TURKEY cebeciz@gmail.com The 4th International Scientific Conference, eLSE "eLearning and Software for Education", BUCHAREST, April 17-18, 2008

2. - any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning (IEEE LTSC, 2002) • any digital resource that can be reused to support learning (Wiley, 2000) • can include anything that has pedagogical value - digital or no-digital such as a case study, a film… (Karman & Koohang, 2005) What is learning object? • any reusable digital resource that is encapsulated in a lesson or assemblage of lessons grouped in units, modules, courses, and even programs (McGreal,2004) • digital resource in any size and format which can be online accessible and reusable in teaching and learning via online networked environments in order to achieve the desired learning outcomes or educational objectives(Nash, 2005) Src: McGreal, R. (2004).

3. I am a learning object Objects waterfall • Medicine • Biology • Physical education • … What is learning object? METAPHORS - Atoms- Legos- Waterfalls learning object:- educational purpose, support learning, pedagogical structure- small, granular, reusable- interoperable- in building lessons, courses and curriculums

4. Learning Objects Repository = LOR Learning Objects Repository = LOR Learning Resources Repository = LRR Learning Repository=LR LORs are the catalogues of the e-learning era. They will be the fundamental first step in knowledge discovery and object exchange. They will provide the foundation for future learning and commerce (Richard et al, 2002) In order to make LOs are accessible and exchangeable between learners and learning systems, there is a need for the systems that organize, index, search and deliver them. Web-based systems, specialized for facilitating these tasks are generally called as learning object repositories A typical food repository in Black Sea Region of Turkey

5. Accessing LOs… Google Altavista Lycos Alltheweb Yahoo Excite … Search engines Directories Portals “growing tomatoes” Google: 153.000 results -too many results -HTML,HTML,HTML -further check is required - no learning purposes ?

6. LORs… • Why? • Difficulties in finding discipline specific resources • Difficulties in filtering resources found for a personal learning objective, • Lack of technical features and quality assurance of the resources, • Lack of educational value and properties of the resources, • Uncertainty in compliance criteria of the content for a specific learning purpose. • What does? • Collection, presentation, and management of learning objects in a central repository which can globally be accessed on the Web, • Cost savings by avoiding repetitions in learning resources development, • Promoting high quality objects production and sharing, • Enabling learning resources exchange. • Who uses? • LEARNERS • teachers, academic staff in f2f and distance education programmes • course authors, learning content developers

7. LORs… MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org) CAREO (http://careo.natera.ca) Maricopa MLX Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx) ARIADNE (http://www.ariadne-en.org) BIOME (http://biome.ac.uk/) SMETE (www.smete.org) ESCOT (http://escot.org) And many more… Agricultural Repositories CGIAR CG-Online EcoLearnIt, US DELOR, Egypt Wisconsin Online, US Most of these repositories are of general purpose and store the objects from many disciplines. In a study carried out by Tzikopoulos et al. (2005), 59 repositories were examined in different aspects. They reported that 3,200 of 881,000 learning resources are directly relevant to agriculture only. This evidently points out that there is a need for object repositories storing agricultural learning objects, and enabling easy access to these objects, where informal and lifelong learning need is too high like agriculture and food.

8. TrAgLor: TurkishAgriculturalLearningObjectRepository • Discipline spesific (agricultur, food,…)- Multilingual (tr, en, de, …)- Multicultural (america, asia, europe…)- Standard (IEEE LOM)- Quality control (editorial review)- Open access tr - Object + Metadata en de

9. Systemarchitecture

11. Object & Metadata Add – Simple

12. Object & Metadata Add – Classic

13. Object & Metadata Add – TreeView

14. Object & MetadataAdd – Upload XML

15. Objects Search advanced search Google-like simple search powerful search engine Search in files (fulltext search) Search by lom fields

16. Object Listing

17. Object Summary View

18. LOM Metadata View in Tabular Form

19. LOM Metadata View in XML

20. Object Directory Browsing

21. Türkiye Tarımsal Öğrenme Nesneleri Deposu

22. Random image banners in every page gives image-based information to the learners, • Customizable view styles for users (will be available in beta 2.0), • A very advanced search mechanism, • Multilingual user interfaces (Turkish, English, and German currently), • Multilingual and multicultural learning content, • Light portal system, News and events content, • Different view styles of metadata (tabular-, xml- and web-views) • Tree view metadata entry to easily build LOM structured elements, • Full LOM compatibility for interoperability between the systems, • Learning objects which are specific to agriculture, food, veterinary, forestry and environmental sciences Conclusions

23. Content and access statistics for TrAgLor (as of 10th April, 2008 since 8th Aug 2007) active visitors: 24 (10.4.2008, 11:00)today visitors: 278 (10.4.2008, 11:00)visitors for this month: 8,720 (10.4.2008, 10 days)Total visitors since Aug'07: 153,026

24. Thank you for your attention! We will be at: http://traglor.cukurova.edu.trhttp://turkonde.cukurova.edu.tr for your: contributions,submissions,cooperations and partnership. This project has been supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK, Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırmalar Kurumu)