Teacher education services based on the Semantic Web: the experience of the Share.tec project

Abstract

This work describes some of the web services that have been developed within the Share.TEC project to foster access, sharing and reuse of Teacher Education digital resources at European level. The Share.TEC platform features personalized functions to help users search for and select educational material via a broad repository of metadata records. These describe educational resources from various European countries and draw on an ontology that captures concepts pertaining to teacher education and maps them across a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. The article also presents Share.TEC’s adaptivity mechanisms, in particular the recommending functionality. This provides extra search support that reduces the need to explicitly specify all the query parameters. Finally, the article reports on the project’s impact on the European Teacher Education sector, and on future development directions.