A student's assistant for open e-Learning

Students often need to go beyond the canned content provided by an e-Learning system's designer. A teacher usually suggests a supplementary corpus, traditionally in the form of books for optional reading and consultation. In an e-Learning context the supplementary corpus would consist of resources which are accessible over the Web, some specified by a teacher and some identified with the help of a search engine. The location of the resources is irrelevant as long as they are accessible over the Web. The paper offers a structured description of a student's assistant designed to identify relevant information from the supplementary corpus. The users are students who indicate a need for help in specific e-Learning situations. Student's learning styles and personalization issues are discussed in this context.