An automatic learning contents selector based on metadata standards

Abstract

Thanks to the technological improvements of the last years, distance education represents a real alternative or support to the traditional formative processes. Internet allows designing contents able to raise the quality of traditional formative process. However, the amount of information students can obtain from Internet is very huge and students can be confused. Also teachers can be disconcerted by this quantity of contents and often they are not able to suggest the correct contents to the students. A solution to these problems derives from the more and more detailed description of each content: in literature this process is defined as process of creating metadata. This paper proposes a web based tool for metadata creation and management and automatic selection of contents in order to form a learning path. With this tool the teacher can describe the contents, students profiles, ontology, according to description model that at this moment are "standard de facto". The proposed tool selects some elements of various metadata and automatically identifies their relationships in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every students profiles. © 2003 IEEE.