Educational Recommender System based on Learner’s Annotative Activity

Abstract

In recent years, Educational Recommender Systems (ERSs) have attracted great attention as a solution towards addressing the problem of information overload in e-learning environments and providing relevant recommendations to online learners. These systems play a key role in helping learners to find educational resources relevant and pertinent to their profiles and context. So, it is necessary to identify information that helps learner’s profile definition and in identifying requests and interests. In this context, we suggest to take advantage of the annotation activity used usually in the learning context for different purposes and which may reflect certain learner’s characteristics useful as input data for the recommendation process. Therefore, we propose an educational recommender system of web services based on learner’s annotative activity to assist him in his learning activity. This process of recommendation is founded on two preparatory phases: the phase of modelling learner’s personality profile through analysis of annotation digital traces in learning environment realized through a profile constructor module and the phase of discovery of web services which can meet the goals of annotations made by learner via the web service discovery module. The evaluation of the developed annotation based recommendation system through empirical studies realized on groups of learners based on the Student’s t-test showed significant results.