Abstract
After the arrival of the web in the 1990s, educational institutions started to maintain their learning materials within Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), as the web is a significant source of material for many students and teachers. However, there has been less development in the current VLEs in the past few years, which remain heavily centred on single institutions even though the web has been developing (e.g., web 2.0, web 3.0). There is a clear need to integrate VLEs with the wider and social Web and maintain its learning contents freely open in order to support the sharing and reuse of learning resources. In this PhD project, we have prototyped a simple VLE that makes use of Version 7 of the Semantic Content Management System (SCMS) Drupal in order to provide a more open, social and semantically structured learning environment. Essentially, we aim to add semantic markup based on Schema.org vocabularies (the semantic markup that is supported by major search providers including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex), and integrate social networking and media to develop and enhance VLEs by improving sharing, discovering and reusing of learning contents. In June 2011, the major search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex) announced the new innovation of Schema.org. This PhD project focuses also on our proposal to Schema.org by proposing additional concepts to describe VLEs’ content with rich semantic information due the limited support for describing educational resources in the current schema. This proposal aims to extend to the previous work that has been included in the schema by The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) in order to provide an enhanced approach to describe learning contents with rich semantic data in a VLE context. Through this thesis project, we will introduce, describe, evaluate and discuss the prototyped VLE in order to demonstrate the advantages of social and semantic web technologies for VLEs. We demonstrate how an advanced SCMS such as Drupal can offer advantages over existing VLE platforms in terms of: sharing of learning content with social networks; provision of advanced media features. We also demonstrate how Drupal’s support for schema.org can be used to enhance the findability of on-line learning content, and propose enhancements to schema.org that will make it more relevant to the needs of learning platforms. This proposal has been evaluated by schema.org and LRMI and a working group set up to take the proposal forward.