Improving the Efficiency of Web Searches in Collaborative Learning Platforms

The web is nowadays one of the main information sources and information searching is one important issue where many advances have been reported. However, in learning environments, web searches do not consider the learning context in order to provide more adequate learning content. As collaborative learning platforms are usually web-based systems, it would be important to add a contextual web query tool to provide additional learning material from the web. This paper describes a strategy for incorporating such functionality in online social networks, as they can be used as collaborative learning platforms. In this study, the learning environment was a learning community in an online social network, in which a course was implemented. Contextual search was provided through a prototype that implements the proposed query expansion, which was evaluated using learning documents. Some results are summarized and presented.