Folksonomy-based Indexing for Retrieving Tutoring Resources

As more and more undergraduate students act as voluntary tutors to rural pupils after school, there is a growing need for a resource repository to support tutors during their tutoring process. However, when tutoring resources are not text-based, such as a clip of Flash animation, the technology of conventional information retrieval cannot be simply applied to retrieve these resources. Therefore, we propose a folksonomy-based indexing method to improve the performance of retrieving non-textual tutoring resources. The proposed approach consists of an initializing phase and a self-organizing phase. This study investigates the performance of constructing and maintaining the folksonomy-based index. In addition, the attitudes of tutors toward the folksonomy-based indexing method are addressed. A prototype of the tutoring resource repository has been designed and implemented, and experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. The results show that the folksonomy-based index can be constructed and maintained efficiently. Also, survey on tutors shows the proposed approach can help them find relevant resources efficiently.