Discovery of educational resources using a similarity metric based on educational alignments: anybody interested?

[Renato Cortinovis]

Dear All,

I have experimented with a (LR-based, of course) prototype supporting the discovery of “similar” educational resources (a “more like this” functionality). It exploits a similarity metric based on educational alignments, offering users full control on the *degree of similarity* of the resources identified. You might just have a quick look at the screenshots of the prototype at https://github.com/renatomario/ERD3 .

Results suggest that educators strongly appreciate the possibility to identify similar resources based on educational alignments, especially if they can control the degree of similarity. For example, educators appreciate resources with a high degree of similarity (in terms of learning objectives, not content) for remediation activities, but prefer resources with lower degree of similarity for in-depth activities.

Is anybody interested in implementing this “more like this” functionality on their search portal (and collect some feedback on its use)?

Renato

PS - Meanwhile, I would like to thank this community that contributed to my activity in many ways:

• free availability of *centralized* “crowdsourced” educational metadata, in a mostly *standardized* format (LRMI),
• free access to the powerful Extract and Obtain services,
• ideas and prototypes shared in this developers community, that I could build upon.