Towards a Teacher Application to Support Semantic Annotations of Learning Tasks in Cultural Heritage

New generations should learn about the Cultural Heritage (CH) that surrounds them to value and preserve it. Common strategies for learning CH include lectures, textbooks, and also cultural visits to CH sites. Cultural visits allow very rich learning experiences but are quite challenging to prepare and carry out. This paper presents Cultural Heritage Educational Semantic Tool (CHEST), a web application that enables teachers to identify monuments of interest and annotate them with learning tasks. The created learning tasks will be carried out by students using an existing application, named Casual Learn, that makes use of a dataset of learning tasks created from information available as Linked Open Data. CHEST overcomes an identified limitation of Casual Learn by giving the teachers the possibility of enriching the existing semantic dataset of monuments and associated learning tasks with customized content while hiding the technical complexity of Semantic Web technologies. Additionally, CHEST promotes the reusability and adaptation of learning tasks by different teachers. An early version of CHEST was used by two secondary school teachers in real-life situations to design customized tasks for their students. These tasks were then carried out by the students via Casual Learn. These teachers gave a high usability score to CHEST and were interviewed to obtain further feedback. They were keen to publish new tasks, share them with other teachers, and reuse tasks from other teachers.