Sharing the digital pedagogical resources among institutions of higher education in Morocco

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1 Sharing the digital pedagogical resources among institutions of higher education in Morocco H. Slimani (1), N. El Faddouli (2), M. Khalidi Idrissi (3) et S. Bennani (4) Mohammadia Engineering School, Mohammed V-Agdal University, Rabat, Morocco (1) (2) (3) et (4) Abstract - In this paper, we tackle the issue of inventory of digital resources within institutions of higher education in Morocco. We also raise the issue regarding the lack of centralization, sharing, and archiving of resources among these institutions. We aim to create a model of a Moroccan bank of digital resources. We then present a solution detailing the concept of repository of digital resources and adopting the ORI-OAI model. We will modify such a model so that every query on the search engine triggers a result that match the profile of the user who makes the search. Keywords - Digital Resources; repository; ORI-OAI; metadata; search for personalized information; user profile I. INTRODUCTION In Moroccan institutions of higher education and research, the question a coordinated and global management of the profusion of digital educational resources stands out. The objective of such question is to ensure a permanent and easy access to research output. The typology of resources is varied and can include, for example: Pedagogical resources (course materials, statements and corrected exercises and examinations, MCQs, etc..) Students projects (presentations, project reports, training reports, etc..) Research (scientific papers, technical reports, the master's dissertation and doctoral thesis, etc.) Administrative documents (circulars, memos, etc.) Editorial documentary resources held by the institution (journals, electronic journals, electronic books, etc.) This paper is organized as following: In Section 2, we will tackle the issue of inventory of digital resources and raise our problematic. Our goal is presented in Section 3.The repository of digital resources is described in Section 4. In Section 5, we propose the modified ORI-OAI model to customize the search result according to the user profile. Finally, in Section 6, we draw a conclusion and lay out the perspectives. II. REVIEW OF THE CURRENT SITUATION Most of the resources used in the academic institutions in Morocco are on paper medium. Even if we noted that there was voluminous growth of digital documents published in the recent past due to the increase in use of information and communication technology (ICT). Exchange among teachers and students are via or removable media. Overall, teachers feel that the digital educational resources create added value compared to traditional media. They, indeed, provide means of a diversification of materials and activities; they also draw the attention of students and promote exchange and interaction. The prevailing problem is that these digital resources are not centralized or archived within these institutions. They are managed in a dispersed manner, without any single coherent repository for all departments and stakeholders. In such an environment, resources are not well referenced: Absence of author identification Absence of standard norms of the metadata records description. The resources can duplicated The access rights are not well managed. Sometimes students and researchers are not informed of the availability of certain particular documents. III. OBJECTIVE The repository of digital resources concept aim particularly at streamlining the processes of broadcasting and production of resources by improving their archiving and value enhancement through a quality indexing and sharing ; hence facilitating the creation of new resources. The main objective is to achieve a bank model of Moroccan digital resources allowing thereafter any institution of higher education and research partner to have a platform for data storage, indexing and referencing its free digital resources. This platform must link to other platforms of other partners to create

2 a multi-platform for research data exchange purposes. It will therefore enable: * Teachers to create a new rich pedagogical content based on previous work such as courses, exercises and examinations, experiments, etc. * Students to have a variety of courses, exercises and answers to prepare for their exams. These digital learning resources are produced either locally or by partner institutions. * Researchers to get easy access to all research works (publications, technical reports, Master's papers and Ph. D. theses, etc..), for better managing their own research topics or to inspire new ideas. IV. REPOSITORY OF DIGITAL RESOURCES A. Repository A database which gathers all metadata describing each resource. The repository is provided and maintained by an operator and can reside on one or more servers, not necessarily the same as those where the resources themselves are stored [1]. A repository is identified by a set of criteria: - Store the metadata record describing each resource and its physical file where it stores only a metadata record with a URL which allows access to the resource. A repository may refer to the storage of metadata only, while a resource bank applies when the physical file for the resource is also stored and managed; - Provide an authentication interface for submission of resources and metadata creation; - Provide a public interface for research, browsing, display, storage and retrieval [2]. B. Principle for open archives initiative (OAI) Each time someone looks up a document on internet, it must go through a general search engine that will provide him with responses or visit of numerous portals that operate in different ways, which requires a longer response time [1]. OAI offers a new concept for access to information, the idea is simple; before being made available to users, each document must be completed by a description tag (figure 1). Figure 1 : Principle OAI [3] Once these tags are in place, there is no need any more to move the documents unless they are selected by a user who wants to download them. For the remaining documents, only description tags are communicated among portals. The light weight of information contained on these tags reduces the communication flow and is easy to be stored in the different portals. By connecting to a network portal, users can easily get access to the description tags corresponding to the request and download the documents he/she needs. As part of a portals network OAI. Each portal periodically sends queries to other portals to receive description tags. Each portal offers all the listings of all documents on the network. Whatever the network portal, the user can access via a single query to the records of all portals and even more to all documents available on the network. The portals are constantly fed with new description tags and send their own tags to one another. This perpetual activity of look-up queries allows continuous updating of portals. Due to the OAI, information producers can keep their documents home and can easily edit or update them without any concern for space on their local hard drives. C. Quality for reuse (Q4R) model This model (Quality for reuse) is based on an analysis of 300 repositories, 22 of which answer an information questionary with respect to the types of insurance quality that they use at the organizational level [2]. In general, this is a request sent by the organization to create a repository for its members or a proposal received from a larger network of individual institutions to join the efforts for building an institutional repository at the national or global level. In general, a repository is created for an institution whose members can access it. Several institutions who wish to network their repositories can also create a repository for sharing. The Q4R model (figure 2) consists essentially of five main procedures; three describe the implementation and maintenance of the repository and two describe the continuous flow feedback for all actors [2].

3 The model distinguishes five types of roles or actors: the manager, the contributor, the re-user, the evaluator, and the indexer. A given person can have more than one role, and many people can have the same role, such an evaluation team or indexing. Figure 2 : Q4R Workflow Model [4] LOR = Learning Objects Repositories 1) Analyze Organizational Needs Activity triggered by either a proposal from a larger network repository or by internal requirements. Analyze the request / proposal; Define the purpose and objectives of the repository; Identify the final user and the needs; Identify the type of resources to integrate; Identify communication channels repository; Identify the list of constraints. 2) Elaborate Q4R kit A Q4R kit is the set of policies, guides, tutorials and work tools that are selected in order to develop and maintain the quality inside a repository ensuring that reuse is increased. Efforts to develop and maintain the quality of a repository consider the importance of the number of users who are willing to contribute to both the creation and reuse of learning objects. To reach this inflection point, which is to ensure reusability, we must take on consideration: Strategies for managing changes, Adopt and moderate the strategies of insurance quality, Include the automatic feedback systems, Include the automatic generation of metadata, Provide the copyrights that are easier to understand and apply. 3) Use and Maintain LOR Quality This model shows the main activities that each role performs and how it creates a repository of high quality, whether a referential (metadata records storage and a URL to access the object itself) or a repository (object stores + the metadata record). 4) Evaluate and Report The feedback loop implies that all repository users involved in the evaluation and maintenance of the quality of the reference and learning objects. For doing this, the policies provide guidelines on how the repository should work. It is, therefore, important that they are respected. In terms of technical quality, it is also essential that all users, regardless of the role in relation to the system, report difficulties or malfunctions. It is therefore important that the team repository management systems provide a feedback system that is easy to use.. For example, if a resource is not in working conditions or a link is no longer accessible, it should be reported automatically, but if it fails after use, it must be reported by the re-user. 5) Examine Feedback and List Revision All roles of actors are involved in maintaining the quality of the repository. They do this by participating in policy development in accordance with these types of quality insurance measures. Policies and guidelines are metadata documents that provide evaluation criteria. Pedagogical, Technical, Socio-cultural, Accessibility and ergonomics. The management team of the repository is in charge of regularly reviewing the assessments made, and distribute the element of revision to those concerned of the organization. This is an ongoing activity that helps to maintain quality in the repository. D. The Repository Team This team brings together all main participants in a resource repository. Generally, these will be mandated by an organization called repository team or repository operator or project team. The team members interact through a management system repository of resources such as ORI-OAI, Eureka, Paloma or COMET to implement and manage a repository of resources. This team analyzes the needs, develop quality assurance strategies and coordinate the implementation and management of the resource repository.

4 To ensure the quality of a repository of digital resources, the orchestration of different expertise is essential. Given the diversity of knowledge required, it is likely that the responsibility for the quality of a resource based on several individuals who must coordinate their tasks throughout the phases of managing a resource. In addition to the user (or reuser) and the contributor / provider resources found the evaluator resources (often an evaluation committee), indexer and the manager who coordinates the establishment and evolution of the repository. C = Link composition 1) Contributor / Author Figure 3 : The team repository [4] The Contributor / Author can be the author of a resource (eg, a teacher), or editing resources department, or organization that reference the resource and reap offers for their integration into a repository of resources [5]. 2) Evaluator Follows the policies established by the team, using rubrics, provides feedback to the supplier on the meaning of the resource, the resource sends accepted the indexer. 3) LOR Manager Clarifies the requirements, solicits contributions, identifies and ensures the correction of problems, manages the project team and ensures the implementation and management of the resource repository [6]. 4) Indexer Applies the standard referencing retained, enters and checks the metadata, identifies errors and referencing, checks the degree of interoperability. 5) Reuser The users and re-users of resources can be professors, designers, educators and students who conduct research in the repositories of resources, who use and annotate resources [7]. E. Customized research in a repository Given the large number of digital resources in the repository, the standard search without filtering or personalization will surely not satisfy the needs of a user, which remains a very important goal to achieve. The purpose of customizing the information is to provide users with increasingly relevant results to their research. One way to achieve personalization results of a request is to integrate the user profile in the research process. To deal with this issue, we will adopt in the next section the model of ORI-OAI repository with the changes: Adding a new module in order to obtain personalized and relevant results according to the user profile. V. A REPOSITORY MODEL A. ORI-OAI Model ORI-OAI [3] is a tool for referencing and indexing of digital resources for a portals network that is based on the principle of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), using the protocol OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)[8]. It is used in REFRER project (francophone resources network reusable educational) which falls within the framework of the national project digital Morocco ORI-OAI allows swapping of listings or metadata that are in the form of a record describing a resource with metadata that is considered relevant (Title, Author or Creator, Subject and Keywords, Source, Resource Type, Description, classification etc.) without swapping physical resources. ORI-OAI aims to establish an open system to: Manage and publish the local production of institutions of higher education, Share them with other institutions Bring them a higher value by indexing quality. Make them accessible remotely. Figure 4 : Architecture of ORI-OAI model [3] The ORI-OAI system (figure 4) goes in the form of 7 independent modules but interoperable as used in the REFRER project that is:

5 Workflow manager input: it is used for workflow referencing resources. Metadata editor: This is a graphical interface for entering metadata related to a resource. Indexing engine: The role of this module is to establish an index metadata. Storage exposure metadata: allows exposing local metadata records or those harvested from other storages. Metadata harvester: it allows the harvesting of metadata records on any OAI. Search engine: This module provides a graphical interface for searching and displaying documents in the system. It generates queries in Lucene syntax [9]. Vocabularies manager: it manages the vocabularies used in different modules. ORI-OAI fits perfectly our goal of having a model of a bank of digital resources corresponding to the context of the Moroccan education system in order to preserve the digital heritage scientific, educational and documentary institutions of higher education and research in Morocco and to share and exchange their productions. We have deployed and configured ORI-OAI at our institution. We are currently indexing the resources to test the environment. The disadvantage of the model described above is when different users and whatever their role in the system, writing the same keywords in the graphical interface of the search engine, everyone gets the same results without search customization according to interests and preferences of users. In order to fill this gap, we propose in the following an amendment of the ORI-OAI model. B. ORI-OAI model modified To allow customization of the results obtained by the search engine according to interests of users, we've added an eighteenth module (figure 5). It is the user profile, which should contain more personal information about the members of the team repository, another field called center of interest that may contain one or more digital values. In the case of several centers of interest, they must be ordered according to their order of importance, they will be represented by the corresponding indices from the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification)[10]. Figure 5 : Architecture ORI-OAI model modified We have established a link between the new module and the search engine to have an interaction between the two modules as follows (Figure 6): The Lucene search engine retrieves all records by running the user query, if any of them is found a message is displayed to this effect. Otherwise the Lucene consult user profile module, seeks first identifying the current user and his index DDC which represent his interest center. Then, it compares the DDC index of the first interest center of said user with the field of classification DDC of each recovered recording. The latter index is metadata in all records of the system; if they are equal it means that the digital resource that is represented by the compared recording is the focus of the user. We repeat the comparisons with the second DDC center of interest, and so on until all interest centers will be done. In this way, we can schedule and filter the results according to the priority of interests before displaying them. The flowchart of the program we realized below summarizes all transactions:

6 VI. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES It is very beneficial for a developing country like Morocco to take measures to make the sharing and pooling of digital resources among its higher education and research institutions. It constitutes a primary goal to increase the reuse of the digital resources in general and digital educational resources in particular. We have detailed the principle repository based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which aims to facilitate the exchange and enhancement of digital archives allowing service providers to retrieve metadata about sites providers data through the OAI-PMH, and then we proposed a modification of the ORI-OAI model adopted as a solution to our problematic, namely allowing customization of results obtained from search queries. In terms of perspective, we intend first of all to implement a user profile; which is standardized and interoperable adapted to the Moroccan context, then boost the development of this profile while taking into consideration the changing interests of users by analyzing the requests that they submit. We also plan to create a new profile Application Morocco SupLOMMA declining LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard for a standardized description of digital pedagogical resources that will be indexed at partner institutions, which will create different controlled vocabularies that are used in higher education in Morocco using four languages: French, English, Arabic and Tamazight. Figure 6 : Flowchart of the program Customized Search The user will have access to his profile as he has the right to change, delete, add, or reclassify his own interests. References [1] H. Slimani, N. El Faddouli, M. Khalidi Idrissi, S. Bennani ( Décembre 2013) L indexation des ressources numériques et l assurance qualité dans un référentiel basé sur l initiative pour des archives ouvertes(oai) ; 26 décembre 2013; Wotic13 Fès. [2] Qualité pour la réutilisation stratégies d assurance qualité et pratique d excellence pour les banques d OA : 3/language/fr-FR/Default.aspx [2013]. [3] Le patrimoine numérique scientifique, pédagogique et documentaire des universités et le partage par un réseau de portails communicants en OAI : [2013] [4] Paquette, G. (2013) REFRER Processus R4Q, avril 2013 à l EMI Rabat Maroc. [5] Paquette, G. (2013) REFRER guide du contributeur avril 2013 à l EMI Rabat Maroc. [6] K. Lundgren-Cayrol, I. de la Teja, S. Lapointe,TÉLUQ pour le groupe GTN-Québec Adapté par Gilbert Paquette, avril 2013 à l EMI Rabat Maroc. [7] Paquette, G. (2013) REFRER Guide du ré-utilisateur avril 2013 à l EMI Rabat Maroc. [8] Le protocole OAI-PMH, OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting): [2014]. [9] Moteur de recherche Lucene : [2014]. [10] Classification Décimale de Dewey : Dewey [2014].