Enhanced learner centered pedagogical strategy: Promoting STEM with underrepresented populations

An efficient pedagogical strategy in an Open Social Learning environment is required for effective learning on the web. Increased collaboration among the learners and mentors makes the learning experience efficient. This paper proposes an enhanced Pedagogical strategy for searching content through the use of ontologies and the learner\´s profile. The proposed system makes use of ontologies and learner profiles for crawling, indexing and organizing content. The content is then filtered based on the learner and "learner like" learners\´ profile to provide a rich Open Social Learning experience. Natural Language Processing is then used to semantically categorize the learning content. It has been shown that this proposed pedagogical strategy, using the ontologies and user profiles for search, Natural Language Processing for programmatic content categorization and graph database to identify learning styles of the underrepresented learners, provides an enhanced learner centered online learning experience.