BBookX: Design of an Automated Web-based Recommender System for the Creation of Open Learning Content

We describe BBookX, a web-based tool that uses a humancomputing approach to facilitate the creation of open source textbooks. The goal of BBookX is to create a system that can search various Open Educational Resource (OER) repositories such as Wikipedia, based on a set of user-generated criteria, and return various resources that can be combined, remixed, and re-used to support specific learning goals. As BBookX is a work-in-progress, we are in the midst of a design-based research study, where user testing guided multiple rounds of iteration in the design of the user interface (UI) as well as the query engine. From an interface perspective, the challenges we present are the matching of the UI to users’ mental models from similar systems, as well as educating users how to best work with the algorithms in an iterative manner to find and refine content for inclusion into open textbooks.