Multi-Interest Self-Organizing Learning Community Model and Construction Algorithms*

Building learning communities is an effective solution to conquer feelings of loneliness and to share experiences and resources with one another quickly and efficiently for learners in an e-learning environment. Existing community models focus only on each learner's single or primary interest and ignore other interests a learner may hold simultaneously. This paper proposes a multi-interest self-organizing learning community model based on multi-agent technology. Learners with similar interests are automatically grouped into the same community; and, each learner associates with several communities because of his or her multiple interests. This paper also proposes a novel community construction algorithm by calculating knowledge semantic similarity and clustering learner interests; and introduces a dynamic community adjustment algorithm by monitoring the learning activities performed by learners. Experiment results in a real e-learning environment have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the model and corresponding algorithms.