Modeling recommendations for the educational domain

Recommendations for technology enhanced learning scenarios have differences from those in other domains as recommendations in e-learning should be guided by educational objectives, and not only by the users’ preferences. Most efforts so far have focused mainly on researching algorithms that retrieve relevant learning materials to the learner, but other kind of recommendations can be provided due to the richness in services and functionality available in educational web-based scenarios. To find out relevant recommendation items from an educational point of view, a top down perspective can be used to design recommendations, especially for formal learning scenarios. To cope with these needs, we have defined a semantic recommendations model that can be used to describe the recommendations for technology enhanced learning.