About

mEducator logo colour

Although there was an abundance of medical educational content available in individual EU academic institutions, this was not widely available or easy to discover and retrieve, due to the lack of standardised content sharing mechanisms. The aim of mEducator BPN was to implement and critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialised state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared, and re-used across European higher academic institutions.

Educational content included in mEducator covered and represented the whole range of medical educational content, from traditional instructional teaching to active learning and experiential teaching/studying approaches. It spanned the whole range of types, from text to exam sheets, algorithms, teaching files, computer programs (simulators or games), and interactive objects (like virtual patients and electronically traced anatomies), while it covered a variety of topics.

mEducator aimed to:

  • Examine to what extent existing standards for the description of educational material could address all the possible types of medical educational material listed above, and make respective recommendations for standards extensions;
  • Examine to what extent existing standards for educational material packaging and exchange among learning management systems were adequate to support state-of-the-art educational content sharing in medicine and provide respective recommendations for standards extensions;
  • Examine to what extent a recently proposed standard-based reference model for automated educational content discovery, retrieval, and sharing could be deployed for medical educational content delivery and sharing and whether extensions were required.

As a BPN, mEducator attempted to compare two contemporary ways of achieving this content sharing, namely, a solution based on Web2.0 technologies, and a solution based on Semantic Web Services.

mEducator worked closely with the MedBiquitous Europe standardisation body to adopt and implement MedBiquitous technology standards for medical and healthcare education in order to make medical content interoperable and shareable across the European Union. For this to succeed, material was re-purposed for multilingual, multicultural use and access. Provision of the material to non-partner institutes was planned with the foreseen (sustainability) aim to invite more institutes into the distributed pool. Last but not least, mEducator invited students, educators, and health professionals (continuing education) to evaluate its outcomes.

Team

Stefan Dietze
John Domingue
Dong Liu

Partners

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
University of Cyprus
Democritus University of Thrace
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
SITUSI Limited
University Nice Sophia Antipolis
Medical University Plovdiv
University degli studi di Catania
University of Helsinki
St. George’s, University of London
Succubus Interactive
European Cervical Cancer Association
Coventry University

Publications

Dovrolis, N., Stefanut, T., Dietze, S., Yu, H.Q., Valentine, C. and Kaldoudi, E. (2011)  Semantic Annotation and Linking of Medical Educational Resources, 5th European Conference of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE MBEC), Budapest, Hungary

Dietze, S., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2011) SmartLink: a Web-based editor and search environment for Linked Services, Demo at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, Heraklion, Greece

Yu, H.Q., Dietze, S., Li, N., Pedrinaci, C., Taibi, D., Dovrolls, N., Stefanut, T., Kaldoudi, E. and Domingue, J. (2011) A Linked Data-driven & Service-oriented Architecture for Sharing Educational Resources, Workshop: 1st International Workshop on eLearning Approaches for

Evangelia, M., Taibi, D., Giordano, D., Dietze, S., Yu, H.Q., Bamidis, P., Bratsas, C. and Woodham, L. (2011) Connecting Medical Educational Resources to the Linked Data Cloud: the mEducator RDF Schema, Store and API, Workshop: 1st International Workshop on eLearning Approaches for the Linked Data Age, 717, CEUR

Yu, H.Q., Dietze, S., Pedrinaci, C. and Liu, D. (2011) A Linked Data Compliant Framework for Dynamic and Web-scale Consumption of Web Services, International Journal of Computer Information System and Industrial Management (IJCISIM), 3, pp. 796-803

Dietze, S., Gugliotta, A., Domingue, J., Yu, H.Q. and Mrissa, M. (2010)  An automated Approach to Semantic Web Services Mediation, Springer Service-Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA), Vol. 4, Issue 4 (2010), pp. 261, Springer

Dietze, S., Benn, N., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Makni, B., Liu, D., Lambert, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Comprehensive service semantics and light-weight Linked Services: towards an integrated approach, Workshop: Fourth International Workshop SMR2 2010 on Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web at 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Shanghai, China

Orthuber, W. and Dietze, S. (2010) Towards Standardized Vectorial Resource Descriptors on the Web, Workshop: GI 2010 Workshop on “Web Science” at Annual meeting of the German Society for Computer Science (GI) 2010, Leipzig, Germany

Mitsopoulou, E., , L., Balasubramaniam, C., Poulton, T., Protopsaltis, A. and Dietze, S. (2010) mEducator: multi type content repurposing and sharing in medical education, Issues and News on Learning and Teaching in Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine, 01.12, pp. 26-28, Higher Education Academy.

Dietze, S., Domingue, J., Mrissa, M. and Gugliotta, A. (2010) Context-Aware Semantic Web Service Discovery through Metric-based Situation Representations, in eds. Quan Z. Sheng, Jian Yu, Schahram Dustdar, Enabling Context-Aware Web Services: Methods, Architectures, and Technologies, Chapman & Hall / CRC Press.