The JARDIN project proposes to create an Instructional

The JARDIN project proposes to create an Instructional Design Assistant that will help the teacher to
assemble learning objects and that will present students the relevant learning objects according with their
learning preferences.
In order to achieve this challenge learning objects (LO) need to be annotated by domain tailored metadata,
such as Learning Object Metadata, LOM. But normally, LO do not have sufficient metadata. This is natural
since the manual generation of metadata is an expensive task. One way to reach this goal is to use
Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS), such as Atutor, Moodle or Claroline One of the
characteristics of LCMS is that they allow authors to create course materials with the possibility to be
exported using standards like LOM. However, when authors already have previous materials, like e.g.
course’s web pages, it is not easy to incorporate them to the LCMS with clear semantics. Instead of
LCMS, there are several technologies that permit reusability, shareability and interoperability among web
applications. Ontologies and web standards, such as XML, RDF and OWL, allow the specification of
components in a standard way. Our proposed Pedagogical Assistant use these technologies to
automatically markup course web pages based on their content and to produce standard packages of
learning objects using SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) an ADL initiative.
is your project on schedule? If not, what issues have you encountered? When do you expect to complete?
The project has a delay but the causes are only financial. The first stage of the project is expected to be
completed at April 2010.
what deliverables are now available? What form are they be in? where will they be posted/made available?
The first deliverable is expected to be available at June 2009 and will be posted through LACCIR.
We have ready two prototypes: one of the Extractor of Learning Objects with Metadata, and another of the
Learning Object Recommender. We are working in order to integrate both of them.
describe your evaluation methods, data collected and conclusions reached.
We use surveys administered by Lic. in Communication and user tests as evaluation methods.
We had collected Learning Objects with Metadata from courses from UNED (Spain), INESC (Portugal) and
UdelaR (Uruguay) and also from documents from the MISTICA net.
The conclusions obtained so far show a great lack of pedagogical metadata that exists in the definition of
Learning Objects.
list all publications (submitted or accepted) that are a result of this work. These publications do not need to be
directly on the work but such that this project was influential to the content of the publication.

Un Asistente para la Extracción de Objetos Digitales de Aprendizaje - Aplicación al Portal de
Mística. Regina Motz, Claudia Melo, Alvaro Hernandez y Miguel Angel Perez. III Latinoamerican
Conference of Learning Objects,
28
México. http://ingsw.ccbas.uaa.mx/laclo2008/
al
31
de
Octubre
2008,
Aguascalientes,

La Extracción de Objetos Digitales de Aprendizaje con Metadatos. Regina Motz, Claudia Badell,
Martín Barrosa y Rodolfo Sum. X Simposio Internacional de Informática Educativa (SIIE 2008),
Salamanca, 1 al 3 de Octubre 2008.

Design of a Recommender Educational System Claudia Deco, Ana Casali , Regina Motz y Cristina
Bender.
III Latinoamerican Conference of Learning Objects, 28 al 31 de Octubre 2008,
Aguascalientes, México http://ingsw.ccbas.uaa.mx/laclo2008/

Calidad de la adaptación de cursos a perfiles de estudiantes. Regina Motz, Maximiliano Panario,
Gustavo Signorele y Fernanda Sorribas. Taller Internacional de Software Educativo (TISE2008),
Santiago de Chile 2, 3 y 4 de Diciembre de 2008.

A pedadogic design assistant. Regina Motz, Natalia de Rogatis, Nicolas Millot y Javier Oliva. Taller
Internacional de Software Educativo (TISE2008), Santiago de Chile 2, 3 y 4 de Diciembre de 2008.

LooKIng4LO: Sistema Informático para la extracción automática de Objetos de Aprendizaje.
Regina Motz, Claudia Badell, Martín Barrosa, Rodolfo Sum, Gabriel Díaz, Manuel Castro. Submitted to
publication.
list all presentations on your work.

Objetos digitales de aprendizaje en la Web Semántica y en la Web Social en Tercer Encuentro
Internacional BTM 2008, Punta del Este, Uruguay, Junio 2008.

JARDIN: JUST AN ASSISTANT FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN Invited paper at Project Session
of the III Latinoamerican Conference of Learning Objects, 28 al 31 de Octubre 2008,
Aguascalientes, México.

JARDIN: JUST AN ASSISTANT FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN Invited talk at the
videoconference LACLO-GLOBE, March 2009.
what has been the impact on your teaching, your department/school’s view on teaching?
Some teachers have begun to think about using learning objects and appreciate this kind of
tool.
There is now a project at Instituto de Computacion, Facultad de Ingenieria, financed by the
Comision Sectorial de Ensenianza, UdelaR, to develop the databases course with learning
objects.
knowing what you know now, how would you have changed your approach, methodology, research
questions, etc?
I think the project has been working very well. Other projects that are very important at the
international level, such as Ariadne and Agora, they have contacted us to explore the possibility
to work together on complementary topics.
what is an `aha' that you have learned from this program? Good or bad.
The good news is that this program is capable of giving impetus to the Latin American
researchers to work on projects with a great challenge, despite the bureaucracies.