Supporting Retrieval of Learning Material in a Personalized Context

In traditional e-learning, teachers design sets of Learning Objects (LOs) and sequence them; the material implementing the LOs could be either built anew, or found elsewhere (e.g. from Standard-compliant Repositories) and reused. These tasks widen when it comes to personalized and adaptive web-based education: it could be necessary to specify and organize different versions of the same LOs and different ways to sequence and administer them. In this paper we present a comprehensive framework supporting the tasks of defining/retrieving/importing LOs for personalized courses. It is partially implemented in a Moodle-based personalization system, in which the user is guided through: 1) the theoretical specification of the needed LOs; 2) the retrieval of actual LOs, by automatically querying standard-compliant repositories; 3) the analysis of such items, to import those selected by the user. The system allows scaling towards the organization of a social network of teachers, in which the whole dynamic semantic network representing the knowledge-base of the teachers community can be exploited to strengthen the retrieval power of the LOs search.