SUPPORTING DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES IN VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Decision-making pervades our daily working tasks, and information systems should provide adequate support for this. Many tools have been created, from specific Decision Support Systems (DSS) to business intelligence tools, to various services provided by software platforms that originally have another scope. In this paper, we present a different perspective of integration between DSS-based tools and the information system of the organization, specifically virtual learning environments (VLE). There are trivial examples of usage of DSS tools inside learning contexts, like the evaluation processes performed for educational purposes, but other usage of DSS-based tools are less trivial although very useful. This is especially true when the virtual learning environment is used to support not only educational tasks, but also collaborative and community-based processes. Examples of this integration between DSS-based tools and VLE are evaluating the various candidates for a job position, supporting evaluators in a public tender, evaluating project proposals that have been uploaded in the platform, assigning a prize respect to documents uploaded in a forum, evaluating the best contribution for a wiki item etc. In all these cases, the platform should provide the end-user (the expert / evaluator) with a set of tools that help: a) aggregating grades / votes / "likes" and any other form of value expression using a richer set of mathematical tools, even when these grades are expressed in linguistic form; b) aggregating the evaluation coming from different experts with different background and initial positions, but that with a VLE and appropriate consensus management tools can reach a more shared evaluation community. This paper describes the different settings where multi-criteria, multi-agent tools can be useful inside collaborative environments oriented to educational tasks, with an example of application inside a VLE created by the University of Trento.