Unleashing the Usefulness Educational Resources through Mining of Educational Metadata

1
Unleashing the Usefulness Educational Resources
through Mining of Educational Metadata

• Anne Diekema, Utah State University
• Jennifer Bailey and Blythe Bennett, Syracuse
  University
• Holly Devaul, Digital Learning Sciences
• OpenEducation, September 26 2008

2
Disclaimer

• Life happens
• The research we hoped to present is at a much
  earlier stage than we expected

3
Accessibility

• Open Course Ware
• Content
• Potential users
• Different user needs
• How can people find the course (or course
  component) they need?
• Information search
• Google?

4
Creating sustainable pathways?

• Library of Congress Subject Headings
• LOM Metadata
• Educational Standards

5
1983 A Nation at Risk

• the educational foundations of our society are
  presently being eroded by a rising tide of
  mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
  Nation and a people.

6
Educational standards

• No Child Left Behind Act
• Focus groups showed teachers want to search
  educational resources by standard
• State standards versus national standards
• Standards Alignment Tool (SAT)
• Creating standards cross-walk
• Automatic text categorization using manual
  correlations

7
Hierarchy in standards

• Math
• Number and Operations Standard
• Understand meanings of operations and
• how they relate to one another
• Understand the effects of adding
• and subtracting whole numbers

8
Results Experiment 1
9
Bad SAT

• not broadly and sufficiently reliable for
  immediate automatic assignment within a digital
  library search system
• Sparse data
• Too many categories with no or small number of
  examples

10
New standards data

• www.thinkfinity.org
• 4,000 lesson plans with 100 manually assigned
  standards in their metadata
• Standards that are assigned to the same
  educational resource might be equivalent
• Mining manually assigned metadata
• Add standards data to collections quickly and
  efficiently
• Increasing the accessibility of their educational
  materials in an affordable manner.

11
Similar standards?

• demonstrate conceptual meanings for the four
  basic arithmetic operations of addition,
  subtraction, multiplication, and division
• count, adding one more to the previous number and
  group and count by ones and tens.
• develop fact families of basic facts using the
  inverse relationship of addition and subtraction.
• recognize inverse operations subtraction/addition
  and division/multiplication
• decompose and recompose whole numbers using
  addition and subtraction

12
Machine challenges

• Strength of fit
• Conceptual equivalence detection
• Co-occurrence statistics

13
What are you doing?

• Current work
• Build software to establish ranked equivalency
  relationships
• Next
• Evaluation
• Man versus machine
• Future
• Incorporate new knowledge into system