T-VLC: A Trust Model for Virtual Learning Communities

In the context of virtual learning communities (VLCs), where the participants may not know each other, it is necessary to have a mechanism to help when deciding who to work with and what reliable contents and information sources are. This study aims to design a generic trust model, named T-VLC, applicable to VLCs, which can be adapted to different learning scenarios. T-VLC is composed of eight factors—direct experience, reputation, role, knowledge, security, quality, institutional trust, and closeness, which, with their corresponding weights, will estimate the trust among the members of the community. T-VLC is a generic model that can be adapted to a particular educational context by adjusting the weights associated with each factor. In addition, this article presents the implementation of the model in the modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (Moodle) learning environment systems and describes the experimentation and results obtained in four real educational contexts.