Programme for SemHE '10

Over the last decade, Higher Education around the world is facing a number of challenges. Challenges such as adopting new technologies, improving the quality of learning and teaching, widening participation, student retention, curriculum design/alignment, student employability, funding and the necessity to improve governance are considered particularly in many literature. To effectively operate and to survive in this globalization era, Higher Education institutions need to respond those challenges in an efficient way. This paper proposes ways in which institutional data repositories can be utilized to address the challenges found in different literature. Also we discuss which repositories can be shared across the institutions and which need not to be shared in order to address those challenges. Finally the paper discusses the barriers to sharing Higher Education repositories and how those barriers can be addressed.

We present a pair of prototype tools that enable users to mark up video with annotations and later explore related materials using Semantic Web and Linked Data approaches. The first tool helps academics preparing Open University course materials to mark up videos with information about the subject matter and audio-visual content. The second tool enables users, such as students or academics, to find video and other materials relevant to their study.