Using online presence data for recommending human resources in the OPAL project

Abstract

Web-based Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) have been widely recognized as a mean for supporting and assisting online learning practices. A PLE is a set of services customized by the student. Among these services, resource (either digital or human) recommendation is a crucial one. The paper briefly reviews existing approaches for recommending resources in PLE. Then it describes a novel approach that relies on students' social presence data and is implemented in the OP4L prototype. OP4L makes use of ontologies to formally represent and make use of the students' social presence data. Then the paper reports on qualitative studies that were aimed at getting students' feedback about the social-presence-aware services offered by the OP4L prototype.