Supporting the Retrieval of Open Educational Resources for the Programming Education

Abstract

Context: The growth of initiatives involving open educational resources (OERs) is helping to democratize teaching and access to education. Factors such as cost reduction and resource quality are contributing to the development and dissemination of large repositories that have large OERs collections. In many collections there are resources that can support programming teaching, such as exercises, presentations, complementary materials, and software to use, customize, and share at no cost. However, it is still very difficult to retrieve these resources due to various issues, such as the lack of standardization of terms and limitations of repository search engines.Objective: With this scenario in view, the main objective of this PhD project is to optimize the detection of OERs, especially in the context of programming teaching, thus proposing mechanisms to support the recovery of such resources.Method: The mechanisms will be built through a set of methods and procedures, such as case studies in repositories to identify their organization and structure; mapping and literature review to classify the current state of the art regarding the theme analyzed; and controlled experimentation to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.Expected Outcomes: The main expected outcome of conducting this project is the proposition of mechanisms, such as the main programming domains supported by OERs and the best terms to be used, that support teachers and students to recover OERs from programming teaching. More specifically, it is expected to identify the main repositories with programming content and also revisit the literature on the proposed theme.Conclusion: The development of this project, besides helping the search in repositories, should also contribute to the increase of reuse of OERs, especially those focused on programming teaching; optimize the detection and identification of resources present in the holdings of different repositories; and reduce problems caused by lack of standardization of terms.