What can we get from learning resource comments on engineering pathway

Abstract

K-Gray Engineering Pathway (EP) is a digital library web-site that could help users share their learning resources. Users can catalog, and comment news, blogs, videos, books and papers after login as registered users, and search without needing to login. We have already had the ability to search over comments for all resources, and the "most commented" resources are accessible on the K-12, higher education and disciplinary pages, but for now the ranking is only based on the comments number of each learning resources or the average rating. To help users to evaluate the learning resources not only based on their comments' quantity, but also on their quality, we introduce the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). For AHP couldn't completely suit to our situation, to make it work well, we established a three layers model with objective layer, criteria layer and alternative layer. Subjective expert and objective quantitative information are used to build the judgement matrices. The attributes of the comment,including total number, ratings, length of its content, poster, posting time, are used to defined the absolute importance, and further used to calculate the relative importance and judgement matrices. High dimensional calculation of weightings and consistence are avoided by adopting our estimation method. Experimental results and the comparisons with existing methods validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.