Educational Recommender Systems and Technologies: Practices and Challenges

Recommender systems have shown to be successful in many domains where information overload exists. This success has motivated research on how to deploy recommender systems in educational scenarios to facilitate access to a wide spectrum of information. Tackling open issues in their deployment is gaining importance as lifelong learning becomes a necessity of the current knowledge-based society. Although Educational Recommender Systems (ERS) share the same key objectives as recommenders for e-commerce applications, there are some particularities that should be considered before directly applying existing solutions from those applications. Educational Recommender Systems and Technologies: Practices and Challenges aims to provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art practices for ERS, as well as the challenges to achieve their actual deployment. Discussing such topics as the state-of-the-art of ERS, methodologies to develop ERS, and architectures to support the recommendation process, this book covers researchers interested in recommendation strategies for educational scenarios and in evaluating the impact of recommendations in learning, as well as academics and practitioners in the area of technology enhanced learning.

Olga C. Santos holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Computer Science School of the Spanish National University for Distance Education (UNED) and a MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering specialized in Software Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). Since September 2001, she has been a researcher at the aDeNu Research Group at UNED and since 2005, she is the R&D Technical Manager of the group. Her current research interests focus on taking into account recommendation strategies to provide open source educational accessible user-centered e-learning services for learners. She has participated in 11 international and national research projects, published over 100 papers in various international conferences and journals and co-chaired workshops and conferences related to topics from her research.

Jesus G. Boticario is Professor of several courses at UNED concerning Artificial Intelligence subjects at the Computer Science School. He has been invited speaker at national and international conferences, forums and institutions. He has published over 200 research articles. He has participated in 19 R&D funded projects (Spain, USA, EU). He is head of aDeNu research group and Scientific Coordinator in European and National funded projects in the areas of e-learning and e-inclusion. Jesus is Program Committee member at National and International Conferences. He has co-chaired International Workshops in the areas of user modeling and accessibility. He is reviewer of research projects and international journals. He has held several positions at UNED in the ICT area.