A Federated Recommender System for Online Learning Environments

From e-commerce to social networking sites, recommender systems are gaining more and more interest. They provide connections, news, resources, or products of interest. This paper presents a federated recommender system, which exploits data from different online learning platforms and delivers personalized recommendation. The underlying educational objective is to enable academic institutions to provide a Web 2.0 dashboard bringing together open resources from the Cloud and proprietary content from in-house learning management systems. The paper describes the main aspects of the federated recommender system, including its adopted architecture, the common data model used to harvest the different learning platforms, the recommendation algorithm, as well as the recommendation display widget

A Collaborative Training Platform for Peer-Based Co-Construction of Knowledge and Co-Tutoring

We propose a collaborative training platform where students collectively contribute to the co-construction of the required knowledge to produce their individual semester project. Peers feedback is implemented in order to complete trainers' supervision with peer-training. This collaborative platform is implemented as a social network, where collaborative interactions are organized 1) to engage and stimulate students to share their resources and contributions; 2) to monitor and comment peers' contributions

Gamification-based assessment of group work

The importance and benefit of group work is nowadays widely recognized and acknowledged in education. Group work can be supported by online shared workspaces that allow group collaboration. However, the e-assessment of group work remains an issue. Most of the existing strategies rely on intra-group peer assessment to evaluate individual contribution to group work. We propose an alternative by introducing some gamification components. The assessment of students' individual involvement and performance is then shifted to the engagement of students to contribute and participate into a learning community. The goal is to create an enabling environment to stimulate learning by peer sharing and formative feedback. This paper describes the approach, the online learning platform and some of the latest results