Olga Marino

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to education” and it must be “equally accessible to all”. Aligned with these principles are online learning platforms that offer free online courses that require no or minimal information from their students to democratize learning. Despite the benefits, the lack of user information challenges traditional recommendation systems and, when applied to education, impacts student experiences. This paper addresses the problem of limited student information in course recommendation systems. We tackle the problem by generating a semantically enriched vector-based representation of course content using an Open Knowledge Graph (DBpedia) and Topic Modeling methods, such as LDA and LSA and by collecting tracking events from log systems (Google Analytics) to create a hybrid recommendation system using content-based and collaborative filtering strategies for low-information scenarios. Our experiments use GCFGlobal.org, an online learning platform offering free self-paced online courses to 100 million people, to validate our approach. Results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the previous works in the field contributing to the creation of fairer recommendation systems.

Purpose: This paper aims to propose and evaluate a pedagogically sound and innovative strategy to teach a higher education course that prepares future professionals to intelligently use information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their personal and professional lives. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptual framework used for the design of the course was the socio-constructivism and activity theories. The implementation of the course was evaluated using the intrinsic case study methodology by including several instruments. Findings: The pedagogical strategy proposed proved to be sound, as the evaluation showed that students were able to describe, use and propose innovative uses of a wide range of cutting-edge technologies in their both everyday lives and professional settings; they also had the skills to analyse the opportunities and challenges that these presented. Moreover, students liked this innovative way of learning and ended with a positive attitude towards ICT. Originality/value: Although several courses prepare students to be digital citizens or use ICT to enhance the teaching-learning process, millennials are ill prepared to use cutting-edge technologies in an innovative, responsible and critical way in their future professions. The course that was designed is original in that it goes beyond preparing digital citizens to prepare professionals in any domain to use ICT in an informed and responsible way. Moreover, it is a documented, successful example of an undergraduate universal course in a highly important current society dimension. The authors believe that its pedagogical proposal could be transferred to courses dealing with other global issues such as the environment, economy and peace.