Facilitators: Prof. Sorel Reisman (MERLOT Managing Director; Professor, Information Systems, California State University), Prof. Timothy K. Shih (National Central University, Taiwan)

Date: 13 Mar 2017

Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Venue: PQ703

 

Prof. Sorel Reisman, MERLOT Managing Director; Professor, Information Systems, California State University

 

In an era of Open Educational Resources (OER), open source software (OSS), and open access (OA) publications, MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, stands out as the longstanding, favored digital repository for instructors seeking all manner of open resources for their teaching and research. The MERLOT community, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, consists of almost 150,000 registered members who have built a collection of almost 80,000 freely available learning materials. With more than 1,250,000 website visitors annually, MERLOT is the preferred international, interdisciplinary, multilingual resource for online teaching and learning materials.

 

This presentation will describe new features in MERLOT that broaden its utility for its users. It will demonstrate the system’s multilingual capability, focusing on the newly added discipline portals of Information Technology and Computer Science, recently endorsed by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Education Society.

 

Prof. Sorel Reisman is Managing Director of the international, higher education consortium MERLOT at the California State University Office of the Chancellor, Professor of IS at CSU Fullerton, and President Emeritus of the IEEE Computer Society. He has held senior management positions at IBM (Canada & US), Toshiba (US), and EMI (UK). He is a Senior IEEE member, Computer Society Golden Core member, board member of the Open Education Consortium (formerly the OCWC), and Member-at-Large of the IEEE Publications Products and Services Board (PPBS). He serves on a number of IEEE and non-IEEE journal editorial boards. Received his EE degree, and MA, and PhD in Computer Applications from the University of Toronto. Appointed a Fulbright Specialist in Dec, 2014.

 

Prof. Timothy K. Shih, National Central University, Taiwan

 

(Based on a project from the 2015 Google MOOC Focused Research Award http://googleresearch.blogspot.tw/2015/03/announcing-google-mooc-focused-research.html) Project website: http://edxpdrlab.ncu.cc

 

MOOC brings to higher education a new challenge and a potential big change. Although the concept of flipped classroom encourages students to look at video instructions before class, yet, high quality instructions are hard to create. Sharing learning materials via social network is a potential solution if proper tools are developed for instruction designers. The talk contains the results of a project awarded by Google, using Google technologies to create tools to help MOOC users via social network. The talk starts from an engineering approach to define the specification of Exchangeable Learning Objects (ELOs) and an Open Repository for exchanging materials and experiences. The goals include providing a set of metrics for similarity measurement, searching result ranking, diversity between two ELOs, and relevancy among ELOs. These metrics serve as a base for investigating the searchability and reusability of learning objects. The resulting tool on can further gather a topology of exchanging ELOs among MOOC content users. The topology not only forms an information flow, an on-line social community can be built. Measurements on the social community can be used to know what are the new popular knowledge areas, as well as the influencing MOOC authors. Contribution can be used in strategic planning for future MOOC development.

 

Dr. Shih is a Professor at the National Central University, Taiwan. He was the Dean of College of Computer Science, Asia University, Taiwan and the Department Chair of the CSIE Department at Tamkang University, Taiwan. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). In addition, he is a senior member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE. He also joined the Educational Activities Board of the Computer Society.

 

Dr. Shih has edited many books and published over 450 papers and book chapters, as well as participated in many international academic activities, including the organization of more than 60 international conferences. He was the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, published by the Idea Group Publishing, USA. Dr. Shih is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. He was also an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.