Recommendation of collaborative activities in e-learning environments

Abstract

In distance education environments, collaborative activities such as wikis, forums and chats play an important role in the e-learning experience because they promote communication among students and so allow cooperative learning settings to be implemented. Nevertheless, it could be difficult for learners to pick out the most interesting and appropriate collaborative activities to meet their learning needs. Recommender systems integrated in e-learning platforms are usually used mainly to help learners choose teaching resources, but they can also be useful to suggest the collaborative activities that best fit their learning objectives from a pedagogical point of view. In this context, the paper presents a recommendation approach able to suggest collaborative activities such as forums, chats, wikis and blogs, that combines dynamic clustering and prediction calculus on the basis of the learners' profiles and needs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.