From the 14.06.2023 to the 16.06.2023 the European MOOC Stakeholder Summit (EMOOCs, https://emoocs.hpi.de/) took place in Potsdam, Germany. The EMOOCs is the most important conference for European Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Stakeholders with many renowned participants outside of Europe. The importance of metadata for finding and recommending courses up to the creation of complete learning paths was outlined in a variety of presentations. A focus was placed on the development of the metadata format that also is used for the description of courses in the context of MERLOT. The insights gathered through the cooperation with the partners within the consortium led to a metadata format, which meets the requirements of (AI-based) recommendation services and learning path assistants.
A central component of the success was the exchange of opinions and knowledge between the experts of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) and the platforms for providing online courses (e.g. openHPI and lernen.cloud) and the Hochschule Karlsruhe (HKA), as well as the August-Wilhelm-Scheer-Institute (AWSI), which work on recommendation services and learning path assistants, respectively. Learning path assistants and recommendation services, both, try to match learners with courses that not only fit their learning goals but also their personal competencies, skills and prior knowledge.
Because the cooperation in the MERLOT consortium, a series of relevant attributes in the courses metadata essential for the recommendation of courses could be identified. They will be provided by the participating partners in their course catalogs in the future. Especially the implementation of an attribute for the modelling of learner’s interests needs to be named here. As part of the HKA project, a scoring system was developed based on a conversation of a learner with a chatbot and the RIASEC model. It was now possible to define a corresponding attribute field in the metadata model, which allows for tagging courses with the respective RIASEC code. Learners can now find courses fitting their personality better.
All these results and outcomes were presented on the EMOOCs by HPI and discussed with the participants. Due to the international context of the EMOOCs, it was possible to gather even some more impressions on the metadata format. Overall, the works and achievements so far were acknowledged as very interesting and the innovation power from projects like MERLOT could be demonstrated.
