Supporting students to find relevant learning resources through social bookmarking and recommendations

The abundance of educational resources available on the Web leads to information overload for the students and the difficulty in finding useful and relevant resources for a specific learning context. The solution that we propose in this paper is a platform called Edu3R (Educational Resources Retrieval and Recommendation), which relies on community filtering: students enrolled in the same course can perform collaborative search through various learning object repositories, bookmark the resources of interest, rate them and share them with peers. The rationale is that resources found and selected by peers are likely to be relevant since the learning community is centered around the same course and the same learning tasks and is relatively homogeneous (classmates generally having common learning backgrounds and completing the same curriculum). Edu3R also relies on social tagging, through which learners annotate resources with meaningful terms that reflect the educational context, provide a personalized classification and facilitate subsequent retrieval. Finally, Edu3R also integrates a collaborative filtering mechanism for recommending learning resources based on student similarity. The paper provides an overview of the system architecture, functionalities and pedagogical rationale, as well as a comparison with similar platforms.