Perlcol: A framework for personalized e-learning with social collaboration support

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies like social media has enhanced the interaction and social collaboration support in the educational field. On the one hand, the integration of such sources equips learners with channels to share information, resources, ideas, as well as expressing opinions and comments during the interactions. On the other hand, such integration raises some issues related to personalization by filtering the collaboration support and provide a tailored pedagogical intervention to provide adequate hints and feedback as a means of adaptivity. Existing learning management systems provide restricted collaboration features and are not tailored to students' characteristics like knowledge level and individual traits. In order to overcome these issues, we propose a framework to upgrade the virtual learning environment to provide flexible collaboration and be adaptive to learners' needs. The framework integrates social media tools for seamless collaboration. In addition, it utilizes the generated content during collaboration to identify discussed concepts and learners' characteristics to provide a personalized learning package accordingly. Descriptions of the notions required to develop the framework and an overview of its components and functionality are provided in this paper.