Educational and Scientific Recommender Systems: Designing the Information Channels of the Virtual University* Design Space of Recommender Systems Mechanism Design Problems for Recommender Systems

In this article we investigate the role of recommender systems and their potential in the educational and scientific environment of a Virtual University. The key idea is to use the information aggregation capabilities of a recommender system to improve the tutoring and consulting services of a Virtual University in an automated way and thus scale tutoring and consulting in a personalized way to a mass audience. We describe the recommender services of myVU, the collection of the personalized services of the Virtual University (VU) of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration which are based on observed user behavior and self-assignment of experience which are currently field-tested. We show how the usual mechanism design problems inherent to recommender systems are addressed in this prototype. INTRODUCTION UNIVERSITIES worldwide are hard pressed in meeting the challenges of teaching an increasing number of students, supporting lifelong learning for larger and larger parts of the population and of dealing with growing student heterogeneity. At the same time they must strive to maintain a competitive and high-level research profile in the face of severe cuts in funding and in the face of global competition in the education market [1]. Recommendations for universities range, for example, from a massive deployment of information and communication technology in universities coupled with a move to a common distance learning and progress monitoring environment which would lead to a world market in learning materials as requested in the famous Dearing report [2] to a radical reorganization of universities based on the separation of labor along the value chain as in the media industry with the appropriate restructuring of the university system as predicted by D. Tsichritzis [3]. Surprisingly, market-related ideas as to the concept of a market as a decentralized coordination mechanism with the price system as information channel [4] or the idea of organizing a university as a marketplace [5] are almost absent from the discussion. In this article we focus on the metaphor of a Virtual University as an information market with a recommender system as the market information channel. The fact that state university systems are usually financed from government funds (that is indirectly) should not be an obstacle to such an approach. Even if a direct price system, for example for university courses, is missing, market forces are still operating through means like contractual changes, adaptation of the product quality, and through information channels (e.g. …