Abstract
Learners are more active and interactive interactive in social media as they freely express themselves and share their thoughts and feeling which generates much useful information about their characteristics. However, the same learners are not usually interactive in MOOCs as much as they do in social media. Therefore, focusing on the Learner’s social profile is a key component towards a successful and enriched experience of learning. Especially that MOOCs offer the possibility to sign up using social media accounts. Thereby, profile modelling is an essential step to capture the knowledge about the learners. In this paper, we aim to explore the information generated by the learner’s participation in social media and combine it with his characteristics in MOOCs. Our approach is based on implementing an ontological learner profile that combines other ontologies (IMS-LIP standard, FOAF, and SIOC ontology) as well as some of the major concepts that describe a user in social media. The result of our solution is a social profile ontology (SPOnt) that describes the main concepts of a learner in each environment (MOOCs and social media). We rely on ontology mapping and merging techniques to maintain the semantic links between the different concepts of the two implemented ontologies.
Highlights
In another work [10], we investigated the main challenges of both MOOCs and social media, in particular, Facebook, using SWOT analysis
We re-used existing ontologies and standards such as IMS-LIP standard, FOAF, SIOC ontology, etc. as well as some of the major concepts that describe a user in social media
We rely on ontology mapping and merging techniques to maintain the semantic links between the different concepts of the two implemented ontologies
Summary
E-learning environments are incontestably recognized as an integral part of the learning process, as they provide significant contribution to its efficiencies and effectiveness. Social media are considered a powerful driver of change for teaching and learning practices, in terms of openness, interactivity and sociability [9]. Our approach consists of exploiting the learner ‘s behavior, interaction and personal involvement in social media for the purpose of improving his participation vis-à-vis the courses he enrolls in MOOCs. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based user profile that describes the main concepts and sub-concepts of a learner in each environment (MOOCs and social media). The final result of our approach is the social profile ontology (SPOnt) that contains social information about the learner such as interests and preferences that plays in important role to recommend the suitable course to his needs.
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