Original source tracing enabled by e-learning contents system based on crowdsourcing

A crowdsourcing environment, where there is a very large volume of diverse content resulting from the participation of a mass of unspecified individuals, has resulted in significant changes in education. This paper presents an e-learning content system to manage the inclusion of crowdsourced material on the Web within lecture materials. The e-learning content system comprises a scrape system, learning content editor, and tracing system. As Web content may change with the progress of time, teachers (and students) must check whether the Web-based materials previously used in their classes have been updated. Accordingly, we designed scrape metadata specifications for tracing the original source. These metadata include information on copyrights and tracing, rather than basic data regarding the original source, to allow users to determine whether the original source has been updated. An editor was also configured so that the scraped Web content could be immediately incorporated into the teaching materials for enhanced convenience. The change point tracing accuracy test and utility evaluation performed using this system show that the accuracy of the change point tracing was 97.1% and that this system effectively saves time as compared with checking for changes by entering each URL directly.