A Hybrid Recommender Strategy on an Expanded Content Manager in Formal Learning

The main topic of this paper is to find ways to improve learning in a formal Higher Education Area. In this environment, the teacher publishes or suggests contents that support learners in a given course, as supplement of classroom training. Generally, these materials are pre-stored and not changeable. These contents are typically published in learning management systems (the Moodle platform emerges as one of the main choices) or in sites created and maintained on the web by teachers themselves. These scenarios typically include a specific group of students (class) and a given period of time (semester or school year). Contents reutilization often needs replication and its update requires new edition and new submission by teachers. Normally, these systems do not allow learners to add new materials, or to edit existing ones. The paper presents our motivations, and some related concepts and works. We describe the concepts of sequencing and navigation in adaptive learning systems, followed by a short presentation of some of these systems. We then discuss the effects of social interaction on the learners’ choices. Finally, we refer some more related recommender systems and their applicability in supporting learning. One central idea from our proposal is that we believe that students with the same goals and with similar formal study time can benefit from contents' assessments made by learners that already have completed the same courses and have studied the same contents. We present a model for personalized recommendation of learning activities to learners in a formal learning context that considers two systems. In the extended content management system, learners can add new materials, select materials from teachers and from other learners, evaluate and define the time spent studying them. Based on learner profiles and a hybrid recommendation strategy, combining conditional and collaborative filtering, our second system will predict learning activities scores and offers adaptive and suitable sequencing learning contents to learners. We propose that similarities between learners can be based on their evaluation interests and their recent learning history. The recommender support subsystem aims to assist learners at each step suggesting one suitable ordered list of LOs, by decreasing order of relevance. The proposed model has been implemented in the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), and we present the system’s architecture and design. We will evaluate it in a real higher education formal course and we intend to present experimental results in the near future

Personalized Student Assessment based on Learning Analytics and Recommender Systems

This paper presents a process based on learning analytics and recommender systems with the objective of analyzing student assessment in order to provide clues that can help teachers in scaffolding the students’ performance. For this, a set of tests was used to evaluate students' competence in direct current circuits. The tests had multiple versions and to solve them each student had to use multiple approaches. The results indicate a better performance in calculus and simulations approaches when compared with hands-on and remote laboratories approaches. The analyses also provide support for the recommendation step allowing the configuration of a knowledge base. The process as a whole is consistent in what regards its ability to make suggestions to the students as they complete a given test and to provide teachers with information that can help them formulate strategies to positively impact students’ learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Combining Social- and Information-based Approaches for Personalised Recommendation on Sequencing Learning Activities

Lifelong learners who assign learning activities (from multiple sources) to attain certain learning goals throughout their lives need to know which learning activities are (most) suitable and in which sequence these should be performed. Learners need support in this way finding process (selection and sequencing), and we argue this could be provided by using personalised recommender systems. To enable personalisation, collaborative filtering could use information about learners and learning activities, since their alignment contributes to learning efficiency. A model for way finding has been developed that presents personalised recommendations in relation to information about learning goals, learning activities and learners. A personalised recommender system has been developed accordingly, and recommends learners on the best next learning activities. Both model and system combine social-based (i.e., completion data from other learners) and information-based (i.e., metadata from learner profiles and learning activities) approaches to recommend the best next learning activity to be completed

Combining Social- and Information-based Approaches for Personalised Recommendation on Sequencing Learning Activities

Hummel, H. G. K., Van den Berg, E. J., Berlanga, A. J., Drachsler, H., Janssen, J., Nadolski, R.J., & Koper, E.J.R. (2007). Combining social- and information-based approaches for personalised recommendation on sequencing learning activities. International Journal of Learning Technology, 3(2), 152-168.Lifelong learners who assign learning activities (from multiple sources) to attain certain learning goals throughout their lives need to know which learning activities are (most) suitable and in which sequence these should be performed. Learners need support in this way finding process (selection and sequencing), and we argue this could be provided by using personalised recommender systems. To enable personalisation, collaborative filtering could use information about learners and learning activities, since their alignment contributes to learning efficiency. A model for way finding has been developed that presents personalised recommendations in relation to information about learning goals, learning activities and learners. A personalised recommender system has been developed accordingly, and recommends learners on the best next learning activities. Both model and system combine social-based (i.e., completion data from other learners) and information-based (i.e., metadata from learner profiles and learning activities) approaches to recommend the best next learning activity to be completed.This work has been sponsored by the EU project TENCompetenc

Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners

In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of CSEDU 2020 by SciTePres

dataTEL - Datasets for Technology Enhanced Learning

The dataTEL white paper develop during the dataTEL workshop at the ARV2011. The workshop was motivated by the issue that very less educational datasets are publicly available in TEL, so that the outcomes of different TEL adaptive applications and recommender systems that support personalised learning are hardly comparable. In other domains like in e-commerce it is a common practise to use different datasets as benchmarks to evaluate recommender systems algorithms to make the results comparable (MovieLens, Book-Crossing, EachMovie dataset). So far, no universally valid knowledge exists in TEL on algorithm that can be successfully applied in a certain learning setting to personalise learning. Having a collection of datasets could be a first major step towards a theory of personalisation with in TEL that can be based on empirical experiments with verifiable and valid results. Therefore, the main objective of the dataTEL workshop was to explore suitable datasets for TEL with a specific focus on recommender and adaptive information systems that can take advantage of these datasets. In this context, new challenges emerge like unclear legal protection rights and privacy issues, suitable policies and formats to share data, required preprocessing procedures and rules to create sharable datasets, common evaluation criteria for recommender systems in TEL and how a dataset driven future in TEL could look like

Accessible user profile modeling for academic services based on MOOCs

MOOCs are examples of the evolution of eLearning environments, it is a fact that the flexibility of the learning services allows students to learn at their own time, place and pace, enhances continuous communication and interaction between all participants in knowledge and community building, benefits people with disabilities and therefore can improve their level of employability and social inclusion. MOOCs are leading a revolutionary computer and mobile-based scenario along with social technologies that will emergence new kinds of learning applications that enhance communication and collaboration processes, for that reason a strategy of the use of metadata regarding the achievement of accessibility from content to user preferences is presented in this paper, in order to achieve a better accessibility level while designing new learning services for people with functional diversity based upon MOOCs