Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

This week semantic web technology vendor Talis announced that it’s launching an angel fund — up to 15,000 pounds — to individuals or groups who want to advance the cause of open education. Dubbed the Talis Incubator for Open Education, it’s inviting funding seekers to write a proposal explaining how their projects will use technology to support open education and how they will open source the project deliverables.

The Open Educational Resources movement, sponsored by eminent foundations such as The Hewlett Foundation, aims at enabling people to be able to easily use and share online content and tools for teaching, learning, and research, with an emphasis on their reuse, remixing, revising and redistribution so that education becomes a connected, collaborative and personalized experience.

“We think the principals behind Open Education are going to have a big impact on how education is accessed, assessed and certified in the future,” writes Talis program manager in the vendor’s blog. “Therefore, we believe that by joining in conversation with others who share this view, and helping ideas develop, we can work towards a future where everyone can use the web to share, use, and reuse knowledge openly.”

There certainly is a conversation ongoing today about the contributions of semantic technologies to linking information on the web in meaningful ways to address educational issues such as student retention, curriculum alignment and support for critical thinking. The Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching Report, which was compiled by academics at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and released in July, provides a roadmap for achieving a linked data field across higher education and further education institutions in the United Kingdom.

The report’s authors have concluded that there are three dozen semantic tools and services relevant to its goals in the field of education at this time, ranging from repositories to collaborate content creation tools to knowledge modeling and matching tools and mashups. The report notes, however, that semantic technologies would be adopted on a wider scale if there were a
sufficiently large volume of linked data exposed in machine processable and declarative formats like RDF. To support the development of semantic applications for teaching and learning in institutions of higher and further education it suggests that:

repositories, databases and existing Web 2.0 lightweight knowledge models be exposed in linked data formats;

semantic-based searching and matching services that use linked data to support learning resource recommendations be deployed;

large volumes of education-related linked data leverage collaborative ontology building and reasoning to support critical thinking skills in pedagogical applications.

The outcomes of all this could contribute to improving the quality of learning through contextualized resource discovery based on field of study, type of teaching and learning activity, the report says. Additionally, semantic technologies could contribute to recommending resources that match the topics of student assignments and helping improve workflows for educators around course creation and delivery.

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