AREA: A social curation platform for open educational resources and lesson plans

Content curation has emerged as a topic of interest in the last few years in the Internet. It aims at discovering and ordering interesting resources from the web, and sharing them with others. From the profile and past behaviour of users, new resources that may be of interest can be recommended to them. This paper discusses AREA, a content curation platform targeted at teachers, where they can aggregate into shareboards the resources that they find in the web. Those resources can be used in educational activities, which are the building blocks for composing sequences of activities, that are in turn the cornerstones of guides (lesson plans). The educational experiences that result from the use of guides are also contemplated in the platform. The key original feature of AREA is that it extends the concept of content curation, so that, not only contents, but also activities, sequences, guides, and experiences, in addition to other resources such as persons, events and tools, are first-class curable elements in the platform. Therefore, shareboards of teachers can include any of those elements; and all of them can be shared, commented, rated, and also recommended to other teachers.