Improving social collaborations in virtual learning environments

Abstract

This paper shows how to use social collaborations in virtual learning environments to motivate students in their learning process through recommendations of learning objects between peers. A hybrid recommender system is proposed and implemented in order to provide personalized recommendations for university students. An important contribution of this work is to show how to incorporate different recommendation approaches and techniques in order to produce useful recommendations in a real life scenario. Preliminary results indicate that information about groups of students as well as demographic information and previous evaluations of learning objects, processed with a combination of recommendation algorithms, show to be useful for the generation of personalized recommendations of learning objects.