Discovering Educational Resources on the Web for Technology Enhanced Learning Applications

There are many works in TEL literature aiming to support learners and educators in their educational tasks. A current trend in this field is to develop expert systems and agents able to retrieve the most appropriate educational material. Such systems are great when handling pools of resources specifically designed for education, where the material is associated to educational data about the characteristics of the resource itself and its context of usage. Instead, many Web resources potentially suitable for education are not considered in their reasoning, because of the lack of such educational information. This PhD project aims to propose a solution for exploiting the Internet as an enormous repository of educational material, through an efficient discovering of Web resources that are suitable for education. Then, educational features of the resources shall be deduced and associated to them, building an overall concept map depicting the knowledge about educational material available on the Web. Current and novel TEL technologies are expected to benefit from the proposed research that will provide to them i) a novel huge amount of educational resources, and ii) a reusable representation of the educational knowledge coming from educators and institutions from all over the world.