PLANT: A Distributed Architecture for Personalized E-Learning

This paper presents PLANT, a distributed architecture for personalized E-Learning built upon the Edutella network which is a schema-based peerto-peer system. The goal of PLANT is to facilitate individual learning on the Internet which abounds in a wide variety of educational resources and services. The distinctive features of PLANT are threefold. First, multifarious educational contents as well as individual learners can be evaluated by consensus in unified semantic contexts. This greatly encourages those educational resources with high quality. Second, individual learners can perform personalized search for educational contents and peer learners most relevant to their knowledge background and learning goals. Finally, a rich set of supportive services, such as real-time communications and personalized search, are integrated to provide end users with user-friendly interfaces.