Lightweight domain modeling for adaptive web-based educational system

Support for adaptive learning with respect to increased interaction and collaboration over the educational content in state-of-the-art models of web-based educational systems is limited. Explicit formalization of such models is necessary to facilitate extendibility, reusability and interoperability. Domain models are the most fundamental parts of adaptive web-based educational systems providing a basis for majority of other functional components such as content recommenders or collaboration widgets and tools. We introduce a collaboration-aware lightweight domain modeling for adaptive web-based learning, which provides a suitable representation for learning resources and metadata involved in educational processes beyond individual learning. It introduces the concept of user annotations to the domain model, which enrich educational materials and facilitate collaboration. Lightweight domain modeling is beneficial from the perspective of automated course semantics creation, while providing support towards automated semantic description of learner-generated content. We show that the proposed model can be effectively utilized for intelligent processing of learning resources such as recommendation and can form a basis for interaction and collaboration supporting components of adaptive systems. We provide the experimental evidence on successful utilization of lightweight domain model in adaptive educational platform ALEF over the period of five years involving more than 1,000 real-world students.