Practical guidelines for designing and evaluating educationally oriented recommendations

• User centred design can eliciting recommendations based on educators' experience.
• The e-learning life cycle can personalise the learning experience on learners' needs.
• Layered evaluation can evaluate the adaptive features of the recommendations designed.
• Aforementioned methodologies can be jointly applied through some practical guidelines.
• Guidelines serve to provide personalised education in different e-learning settings.

There is a need for designing educationally oriented recommendations that deal with educational goals as well as learners' preferences and context in a personalised way. They have to be both based on educators' experience and perceived as adequate by learners. This paper compiles practical guidelines to produce personalised recommendations that are meant to foster active learning in online courses. These guidelines integrate three different methodologies: i) user centred design as defined by ISO 9241-210, ii) the e-learning life cycle of personalised educational systems, and iii) the layered evaluation of adaptation features. To illustrate guidelines actual utility, generality and flexibility, the paper describes their applicability to design educational recommendations in two different contexts, which in total involved 125 educators and 595 learners. These applications show benefits for learners and educators. Following this approach, we are targeting to cope with one of the main challenges in current massive open online courses, which are expected to provide personalised education to an increasing number of students without the continuous involvement of educators in supporting learners during their course interactions.

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