A Learning Content Authoring Approach based on Semantic Technologies and Social Networking: an Empirical Study

Semantic web technologies have been applied to many aspects of learning content authoring including semantic annotation, semantic search, dynamic assembly, and personalization of learning content. At the same time, social networking services have started to play an important role in the authoring process by supporting authors' collaborative activities. Whether semantic web technologies and social networking improved the authoring process and to what extent they make authors’ life easier, however, remains an open question that we try to address in this paper. We report on the results of an empirical study based on the experiments that we conducted with the prototype of a novel document architecture called SDArch. Semantic web technologies and social networking are two pillars of SDArch, thus potential benefits of SDArch naturally extend to them. Results of the study show that the utilization of SDArch in authoring improves user’ performances compared to the authoring with conventional tools. In addition, the users’ satisfaction collected from their subjective feedback was also highly positive.