Educational and Scientific Recommender Systems: Designing the Information Channels of the Virtual University

In this article we investigate the role of recommender systems and their potential in the educational and scientific environment of a Virtual University. The key idea is to use the information aggregation capabilities of a recommender system to improve the tutoring and consulting services of a Virtual University in an automated way and thus scale tutoring and consulting in a personalized way to a mass audience. We describe the recommender services of myVU, the collection of the personalized services of the Virtual University (VU) of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration which are based on observed user behavior and self assignment of experience which are currently field-tested. We show, how the usual mechanism design problems inherent to recommender systems are addressed in this prototype.