Added Values of Linked Data in Education: A Survey and Roadmap

Abstract

Education values such as knowledge sharing, and the linked data (LD) abilities such as interoperability are in perfect harmony. Much research has exploited that and provided important contributions and improvements in education through LD. International universities, large open education repositories, OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) initiatives, educational search engines, blending and adaptive learning, learning analysis and other various areas were the targets of many works on leveraging LD. However, this research exists in a scattered way without any type of categorization or organization. In this paper, we present a survey on the current works in educational linked data (ELD) to provide a starting point and a comprehensive roadmap to help researchers in recognizing the main tracks in ELD area. In addition, the paper extracted the common life cycle, outcome datasets and vocabularies from the overall presented works. The paper also provides samples of applications that exhibit the practical benefit of adopting LD in the various tracks and highlights the challenges that each track faced during the utilization of LD. Pioneer ELD’s projects, other existing overviews and landscapes and the most used tools based on the stages and prevalent are presented. Lastly, discussion and recommendations were provided based on the overall study.