Automating the authoring of learning material in Computer Engineering education

Due to the impact that Information and Communication Technologies have in the current society in general, and in academic institutions in particular, there is a growing need for effective creation and management of digital content. But content authoring is known to be an effort and time consuming task. Digital contents used inside Technology Supported Learning Systems with learning purposes are often referred to as Didactic Resources, or Learning Objects if they are annotated with metadata. One of the main advantages of Learning Objects is that they can be reused to support learning in different platforms or environments. Along this paper an experiment carried out with ErauzOnt, a system that automatically builds Learning Objects from electronic textbooks using Natural Language Processing techniques, ontologies and heuristic reasoning is presented. ErauzOnt was able to gather definitions, examples and exercises for the topics of the Object Oriented Programming subject - a compulsory subject studied at the first year of the Computer Engineering degree at the University of the Basque Country - using as a starting point a textbook written in English.