A recommendation module to help teachers build courses through the Moodle Learning Management System

Abstract

In traditional e-learning, teachers design sets of Learning Objects (LOs) and organize their sequencing; the material implementing the LOs could be either built anew or adopted from elsewhere (e.g. from standard-compliant repositories) and reused. This task is applicable also when the teacher works in a system for personalized e-learning. In this case, the burden actually increases: for instance, the LOs may need adaptation to the system, through additional metadata. This paper presents a module that gives some support to the operations of retrieving, analyzing, and importing LOs from a set of standard Learning Objects Repositories, acting as a recommending system. In particular, it is designed to support the teacher in the phases of (i) retrieval of LOs, through a keyword-based search mechanism applied to the selected repositories; (ii) analysis of the returned LOs, whose information is enriched by a concept of relevance metric, based on both the results of the searching operation and the data related to the previous use of the LOs in the courses managed by the Learning Management System; and (iii) LO importation into the course under construction.

Keywords:

• E-learning Systems
• Recommending systems

Notes

1 http://elgg.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

2 http://www.moodle.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

3 http://dotlrn.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

4 http://www.claroline.net (accessed 24 July 2015).

5 http://www.atutor.ca (accessed 24 July 2015).

6 MERLOT is an LOR, available at http://www.merlot.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

7 Connexions is an LOR, available at http://www.cnx.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

8 Wisc-Online is a Learning Object Repository, available at http://www.wisc-online.com (accessed 24 July 2015).

9 Ariadne Foundation, available at http://ariadne-eu.org (accessed 24 July 2015).

10 http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/fulltext-boolean.html (accessed 24 July 2015).

11 DOOR project, available at http://door.sourceforge.net/index.html (accessed 24 July 2015).

12 Contact authors to access the system.

13 Promethean Planet, teaching, sharing and support community, available at http://www.prometheanplanet.com/en/ (accessed 24 July 2015).

14 Classroom2.0, social network for Web 2.0, Social Media, and Participative Technologies in the classroom, available at http://www.classroom20.com/ (accessed 24 July 2015).

15 Teachers Recess, social network for teachers, available at http://www.teachersrecess.com/ (Accessed July 24 2015).

16 https://www.google.com/edu/training/ (accessed 24 July 2015).

17 http://www.teachertube.com/ (accessed 24 July 2015).

18 http://rossieronline.usc.edu/twitter-for-teachers/ (accessed 24 July 2015).

19 Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory, learning material design and social media for teaching, available at http://socialmediaclassroom.com (accessed 24 July 2015).