ERIC Number: EJ1200743
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1939-1382
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Understanding Learning Resources Metadata for Primary and Secondary Education
Peralta, Montserrat; Alarcon, Rosa; Pichara, Karim E.; Mery, Tomas; Cano, Felipe; Bozo, Jorge
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, v11 n4 p456-467 Oct-Dec 2018
Educational resources can be easily found on the Web. Most search engines base their algorithms on a resource's text or popularity, requiring teachers to navigate the results until they find an appropriate resource. This makes searching for resources a tedious and cumbersome task. Specialized repositories contain resources that are annotated with metadata that aim to facilitate the discovery of quality resources. Nevertheless, the abundance and variety of content make searching a complex task. Recommender systems can assist teachers in finding the proper content by determining clusters of similar users and inferring users interest in a resource, assembling clusters of similar resources, or a mix of both. Probabilistic model-based (PMB) techniques, on the other hand, make it possible to classify resources into more than one cluster with various degrees of probability. In this paper, we used recommender systems and PMB techniques to analyze a dataset produced by primary and secondary level teachers over the course of four years and under natural conditions. We found that a hybrid recommendation, the Collaborative Topic Regression (CTR) technique, performs better than other approaches despite the high sparseness of the dataset. In addition, learning resources annotated with curriculum metadata had a positive impact on recommender's accuracy whereas free-text or other metadata negatively impacted the results.
Descriptors: Educational Resources, Metadata, Foreign Countries, Bayesian Statistics, Probability, Models, Prediction, Elementary Education, Secondary Education
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Tel: 732-981-0060; Web site: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4620076
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Education; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Chile
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A