Architecture for Efficient String Dictionaries in E-Learning

E-Learning is a response to the new educational needs of society and an important development in Information and Communication Technologies. However, this trend presents many challenges, such as the lack of an architecture that allows a unified management of heterogeneous string dictionaries required by all the users of e-learning environments, which we face in this paper. We mean the string dictionaries needed in information retrieval, content development, “key performance indicators” generation and course management applications. As an example, our approach can deal with different indexation dictionaries required by the course contents and the different online forums that generate a huge number of messages with an unordered structure and a great variety of topics. Our architecture will generate an only dictionary that is shared by all the stakeholders involved in the e-learning process.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under Project SEQUOIA-UA (TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R), Project RESCATA (TIN2015-65100-R) and Project PROMETEO/2018/089; and in part by the Spanish Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) under Project CloudDriver4Industry (TIN2017-89266-R)

A Computational Method for Enabling Teaching-Learning Process in Huge Online Courses and Communities

Massive Open Online Courses and e-learning represent the future of the teaching-learning processes through the development of Information and Communication Technologies. They are the response to the new education needs of society. However, this future also presents many challenges such as the processing of online forums when a huge number of messages are generated. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of the subject, but the difficulties in following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may produce the opposite effect. In this paper, we propose a computational method for enabling the educational process in huge online learning communities. This method analyses the forum information through Natural Language Processing techniques and extract the main topics discussed. The results generated improves the management of the forums, increases the effectiveness of the teachers’ explanations and reduces the time spent by students to follow the course. The proposal has been complemented with a real case study that shows promising results.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860), GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03), DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001) and RESCATA (TIN2015-65100-R) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitiveness