Bridging the gap between teaching and breaking news: A new approach based on ESHE and ICT

Abstract

Information overload is one of the main challenges in the current educational context. The European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) demands autonomous student's work and that the theoretical concepts introduced in class are contextualized into the current socio-economic situation. In this paper we present iCollege, a new educational platform that compiles information from different sources and presents only relevant breaking news classified into different subjects, enriching both teachers and students learning experience. To do so, we integrate different Information and Communication Technologies, such as RSS feeds, crawling and Natural Language Processing techniques. As an alternative to the traditional practice, now the burden of scanning through a vast number of news to filter those closely related with the course is left to iCollege. The system collects, filter and classify the breaking news. A tags cloud view helps to focus on the most important up-to-dated words/events at a first sight, and eases the access to the relevant information. Furthermore, the platform, through the Wiki technology, promotes collaboration among students and provides different teaching tools to supervise the students’ job. With the current settings, every day, on average, the system retrieves more than 250 news for three courses from 44 different sources, providing an important volume of relevant information for both students and teachers.