Enhancing educational portals through capturing collective knowledge of web-based learning communities

Abstract

Since the early stages of the World Wide Web, web-based learning communities have been constantly developed online. Among the primary objectives of their members has been to share digital learning resources and increase the community's collective knowledge by communicating and collaborating online. In this paper, we discuss how the learning object paradigm can be exploited to support web-based learning communities and online communities of practice, as a means to enhance the services already provided by Educational Portals (EP). It is claimed that this can be achieved by motivating the active interaction of community members with the EPs' resources and at the same time allowing the dynamic update of the available resources taking into account the community's collective knowledge on the real use of the resources. To this end, we present the ASK e-Educational Communities Environment (ASK e-EDCOM), a web-based environment for the empowerment of online educational communities.