Building a recommender agent for e-learning systems

A recommender system in an e-learning context is a software agent that tries to "intelligently" recommend actions to a learner based on the actions of previous learners. This recommendation could be an on-line activity such as doing an exercise, reading Posted messages on a conferencing system, or running an on-line simulation, or could be simply, a web resource. These recommendation systems have been tried in e-commerce to entice purchasing of goods, but haven't been tried in e-learning. This paper suggests the use of web mining techniques to build such an agent that could recommend on-line learning activities or shortcuts in a course web site based on learners' access history to improve course material navigation as well as assist the on-line learning process. These techniques are considered integrated web mining as opposed to off-line web mining used by expert users to discover on-line access patterns.