Modeling Teachers and Learning Materials: A Comparison among Similarity Metrics

• Main Authors: De Medio, Carlo, Gasparetti, Fabio, Limongelli, Carla, Sciarrone, Filippo
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Education; Electronic publishing; Encyclopedias; information retrieval; Internet; Measurement; recommending systems; Semantics; teaching styles
• ISSN: 2375-0138
• DOI: 10.1109/iV.2018.00099

Wikipedia is one of the most used repositories of free learning materials published by communities of experts: most of the students, and teachers do great use of it, despite the criticism about its reliability. Here we address the problem of helping teachers to build courses with Wikipedia pages to prepare on-the-fly courses. We use a web-based system called Wiki Course Builder, which allows teachers to query Wikipedia, by submitting a set of keywords, and having as a response four different ranked lists of retrieved Wikipedia pages, depending each list on a given retrieval metric implemented. In addition to the classic TF-IDF, Information Gain and Latent Semantic Indexing metrics, we propose a metric that highlights specific didactic aspects. This metric is based on the teacher's Teaching Styles namely, the Grasha teaching styles. Wikipedia pages are indexed with the Teaching Styles of the teachers that selected the given page; then, this value is compared with the Teaching Style of the teacher who is doing the search. The metric assigns higher rank to the Wikipedia pages that have a Teaching Style closer to the teachers'. We present an evaluation of the four retrieval metrics, showing that the teacher-styles based metric, Vs. the other three content-based metrics, allows for a better Wikipedia retrieval from a didactic point of view.