E-SoRS: A personalized and social recommender service for E-learning environments

Education is one of the main application areas in personalized systems. Personalization is especially important for Web-based education due to at least two general reasons. First, most web-based applications are to be used by a much wider variety of users in comparison to traditional environments and personalization helps system suit users. Second, such systems are learner centric and users are working with it individually. Contextualization is a common way to make systems personalized. Context-aware systems can detect user’s situation better as well as act more efficiently in response to their needs. In this paper, a personalized context-aware learning system has been proposed to enhance learning effectiveness. Learner’s knowledge level, his/her social relation, distance of each relation, and learning style are some important criteria of the implemented system. Applying this context-aware system in a graduate-level course results in educational improvement and learner satisfaction. Due to the flexibility and scalability of the proposed model, we believe that it could be beneficial to very large learning organizations.