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This article presents COURSR2, an intelligent system aiming at managing the personal time of lifelong learners in an integrated way. Lifelong learners usually try to combine learning with their professional and family duties. Taking in advance informative decisions about whether they have the necessary time resources to devote to a learning object is crucial, both for psychological and for financial reasons. COURSR2 encompasses information for all temporal aspects of a learning object. For example, a course may have lectures, with cardinality constraints over attending them, labs, mid-term exams, final exams, homework, projects and home reading. The user can also represent his non-educational activities, using the general purpose ontology of the SELFPLANNER intelligent calendar application. By subscribing to a learning object through COURSR2, the scheduling engine of SELFPLANNER’s is employed to find viable plans, allowing rescheduling of existing activities. Thus, the learner is able to perform what-if analysis about whether a set of learning objects is compatible with each other, as well as with his other commitments. The latest version of COURSR2 has been deployed and evaluated using real users.

The Internet has promoted several changes in the world. In this scenario, new theories, paradigms and methodologies have been discussed in the education area. In addition, as the development of learning material is expensive and time-consuming, the use of Learning Objects (LO) has been proposed for improving content reuse. However, the emphasis has been on how to describe LO, but it is not clear how to develop them. In addition, people want to satisfy their learning needs according to their personal characteristics such as knowledge background and learning style. The work presented in this paper proposes the increase of LO semantics. The idea behind our proposal is to develop LO based on a model for structuring knowledge (concepts, demonstrations and interactions) according to their context, representation and composition. This approach enables increased reusability and adaptability while providing better structured content material.

As education field has become online due to covid in both schools and colleges, e-learning security has become an important issue. An e-Learning framework provides a collection of online services that are helpful for the learners, resource persons and others who are involved in enhancing the management and delivery of education to all sections of people. The two most important aspects of an e-Learning system are better search of learning resources and the secure authentication between the learner and the trainer. This chapter introduces two novel methods: (i) optimization of Learning Object (LO) search based on learners’ characteristics, (ii) secure authentication of trainers and learners using visual cryptography. Storage and delivery of optimal resources that are well suited for individual learner is always a challenging task. To find the best learning objects, an enhanced attribute-based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm that provides flexibility for the learners based on learner characteristics is proposed. A novel visual cryptography-based technique with kite-based partition technique is designed to perform file sharing and blockchain-based secure authentication and verification of valid learners is proposed for the framework. Several measures like match ratio, relevancy factor, and heuristic values show the efficiency of the proposed ACO search technique in the context of an e-Learning framework.

Interoperability is greatly considered in e-learning systems. XML based standards have arisen facilitating the common methods of description, identification and search of LO which are developed under different formats and platforms thus guaranteeing their reusability.

SCORM standard is imposing in this field. It was developed by Advanced Distributed Learning [6] and based on proposals of organizations like IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee [10] Learning Object Metadata Working Group and IMS Global Learning Consortium.

The most modern e-learning platforms use the standards previously mentioned to achieve interoperability among the different systems. Nevertheless, there is much useful content available in different environments that is not structured according to the standards. This provokes serious difficulties for them to be reused. That is why it is essential to look for alternatives that permit to pack such contents in a way that they may be imported and used in the existing platforms.

An automated procedure that allows the making of Digital Libraries composed of learning objects starting from previously developed content structures is proposed. Tools for facilitating this process have been developed.

It has been applied to contents developed on a platform for teaching Spanish, as a result we have obtained a Multimedia Digital Library of Learning Objects.

The prevalence and continuous advancement of mobile technologies give way to the utilization of mobile devices for delivering learning content to learners. Education can take advantage of the benefits being provided by mobile learning, including self-directed learning and anytime-anywhere access of courses in mobile devices. Learners can use their waiting time (e.g. watching how to tie a knot while waiting for a ride home) to engage in learning experiences that can take place in seconds up to few minutes.