by Alfons Juan, Universitat Politècnica de València
The Internet of Education Conference 2015 (IoE 2015), organized by the Knowledge 4 All Foundation and sponsored by UNESCO, took place on 18 September in Sarajevo, with the goal of bringing together researchers and policy makers from both university and academia to present methods for improving the effectiveness of online and open education. IoE 2015 looked at how education systems and schools in Slovenia and around the world are innovating with Artificial Intelligence methods and tools, video repositories like VideoLectures.Net and innovation environments like OpeningUpSlovenia.
My keynote speech focused on the use of language technologies for Education, with emphasis on recent results by the Machine Learning and Language Processing (MLLP) group. After a brief presentation of the MLLP group, main results from the transLectures and EMMA European projects were discussed.
From EMMA’s point of view, five main conclusions were highlighted:
- Multilingual access to MOOCs boosts their visibility
- The cost of manually translating a MOOC is high
- Automatic translation can reduce the temporal cost to 30%
- Accuracy of automatic translation depends on several factors:languages involved, availability of related data resources and specificity of the course.
- Designing a multilingual MOOC should also take into account: slides, images, application interfaces (demos), bibliography, etc.
The speech sparked considerable interest among the attendants, which included a strong representation of researchers, education officials and policy makers from the South-East European region.