Some of you may be aware that the LinkedUp Project, one of the drivers in the establishment of the Open Education Working Group, is coming to an end. The project officially finishes on 31st October, but we have the Vici Competition awards at ISWC in Italy before then. The LinkedUp Project has pushed forward the exploitation and adoption of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational organisations and institutions. It has sparked lots of interesting discussions related to open data in education and resulted in some great outputs (all covered in this great flyer). We just want to say ‘Thanks’ to LinkedUp for all its support!

Here are some of the great outputs you may not be aware of:

LinkedUp Toolbox

The LinkedUp Toolbox is a support tool for open data competition organisers. It can be applied by those organising academic or industry competitions.

The toolbox has six sections each containing resources: competition framework, evaluation framework, guidance schedule, data, promotion methodology and legal and IPR. The resources are available in formats including video, text, mindmaps, tables, decision trees and Q&A.

http://linkedup-project.eu/toolbox

LAK Challenge/Dataset

The LAK Dataset is unprecedented resource which provides Linked Data, including full text, of all publications from all major conferences and journals in the Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining communities. Innovative use and exploitation of that dataset is encouraged as part of a public LAK Data Challenge, an annual competition culminating in an interactive LAK Data workshop collocated with the LAK Conference.

URL: http://lak.linkededucation.org

LinkedUp Catalog

The Linked Education Cloud is a catalogue of Web datasets relevant to educational applications. It is provided according to the standard of the Web of Data, and is constructed based on input from the LinkedUp Community.

It was built to support participants of the LinkedUp Challenge but its value extends beyond the competitions and as a repository for developers interested in working with open and linked data.

Relevant links

• LinkedUp Catalog
• Linked Education Cloud group on the DataHub
• data.linkededucation.org
• LinkedUp DevTalk blog
• Resources page – list of other useful resources, such as tutorials, that can help you enter the competitions
• There is a dedicated support contact form which you can use to ask questions about the catalogue, technical support etc.

Evaluation Framework

The LinkedUp Evaluation Framework is a complete framework for the evaluation of large-scale open Web data applications, taking into account educational aspects.

It consists of predefined evaluation procedures and benchmarking criteria for the ranking of the participating projects during the LinkedUp competitions. The requirements include interdisciplinary coverage, integration of high-quality web data, integration with local data, context and filtering, scalability and performance and multilingualism.

The evaluation framework has been reviewed after each stage of the challenge resulting in a sustainable and practical evaluation instrument.

URL: http://linkedup-project.eu/ef

W3C Open Linked Education community group

The W3C Open Linked Education community group is a focus point for the community to collect, capture and adopt the practices that are going to be the foundation of the web of educational data.

It brings together existing to gather initiatives the practices currently employed to sharing education- related data on the web including vocabularies and best practices. The LinkedUp consortium (directed by http://linkededucation.org and http://linkeduniversities.org) will lead the community group from autumn 2014.

URL: http://www.w3.org/community/opened

LinkedUp Challenge

Possibly the most talked about of the LinkedUp successes is the LinkedUp Challenge is a series of open data competitions. Previous competitions include Veni, Vidi, Vici in which submissions were received from over 15 countries from both the academic and private sectors.

The result is a collection of ‘open web data success stories’: innovative and robust scenarios of deployed tools integrating and analysing large scale, open Web data in the education sector.
So far tools have been developed that explore resources, concepts, ideas and objects in subject areas and make sense of the world we live in; enrich resources; make it easier to share and find resources, and personalise the way they are presented; visualize learning approaches, connect people and resources.

Annual calls for future competitions are intended to start from 2015.

URL: http://linkedup-challenge.org