On the Generation of E-Learning Resources Using Business Process, Natural Language Processing, and Web Services

E-learning resources are pieces of knowledge used for achieving a learning objective. One of the problems in e-training in the workplace has to do with the lack of relevance of learning resources. Here, we define a learning resource as a resource that contains information about a task or refers to a task realized within the context of an organizational process. We describe a set of activities for the generation of learning resources of objective, content, activity, and assessment types, which correspond to the pedagogical elements in learning objects. The generation goes from a documented business process using natural language processing and the learning resources produced are packaged as web services for independence and reusability purposes. Each learning resource generated is independent since it may participate in several formative sequences on its own, and it is reusable since it may be used many times without any change.

Learning resources are pieces of knowledge that are used as a basis for achieving a learning objective. In today´s world, they are in digital formats and called e-learning resources. They are used for distance education in universities, but they are also used for training in organizations, also known as e-training or e-learning in the workplace. According to the paper by Wang, e-training in the workplace is defined as the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for improving and/or supporting learning activities realized within work contexts, with the purpose of improving individual and organizational performance. In this sense, fulfilling a learning objective is a difficult task due to the span between the learning resources and what needs to be learned in the workplace, amongst other things. Wang calls it a lack of relevance of learning resources for an organization. That is, the learning resources used in the workplace do not correspond to the processes that have to be executed by employees; therefore, the purpose for which e-learning is implemented may not be achieved. A solution to this problem is to align the learning resources to the business process. Some related works^– use machine learning in recommendation systems to provide personalized learning resources for students. Other works such as in the papers by Nurcan et al., Smirnov et al., Bobrik et al., Burattin, Pittke, Ardagna et al., and Dayal et al. propose definitions of business process models. In general, all definitions concur in that a business process model is a set of related activities, events, and gateways. Very few of them consider the task. The task is an action carried out by a role to produce a deliverable of the business process, and several tasks constitute an activity. We consider the use of the tasks in a business process to generate relevant learning resources. For our purpose, a learning resource is relevant if the resource contains information or refers to a task realized within the context of an organizational process. Based on that, we generate learning resources of different media types in the form of text, audio, and video by using natural language processing: we then pack them into web services in order to make them independent and reusable and to be delivered using open standards such as HTTP, XML, and JSON. Because of this, we refer to learning web services, as the web services whose only responsibility is to deliver learning resources. Aljazzaf et al. provide a brief definition of web services as self-contained, self-described, dynamically discovered applications with Internet-based interfaces.