dc.description.abstract | Learning objects are reusable digital resources used in education. They are expensive to
create and it is hard to maintain a sufficient amount of metadata in them. This impedes
the ability to locate learning objects for reuse.
Computer supported learning, and its branch called e-learning, aims to engage the
students in their own education. This can be beneficially used to create metadata in
learning objects, by engaging students to tag their own learning objects.
This thesis examines how students use a system designed for annotating learning
objects, and discovers that students are not willing to tag. Interviews were conducted,
which discover that a tagging system needs to be introduced as an integral part
of the course to induce participation, as well as properly communicate the benefits for
the students themselves. The used system, implemented in the Learning Object Repository
DSpace, is evaluated to determine how well it is suited for implementation of social
technologies like tagging in a production environment. The thesis also investigates how
well the tags produced can be used to retrieve related objects by testing a new algorithm.
Promising results were observed with a test set, but the algorithm could not be tested
with real tags from this study, as the tag set was too small. | en_US |