Semantic Web-based Group Formation for E-learning

Collaboration has long been considered an effective approach to learning. However, forming optimal groups can be a time consuming and complex task. Teachers often need to set some constraints for the grouping based on the aim of the collaborative task. To achieve optimal grouping, the formation needs to satisfy these constraints, even when the list of students is unknown. In this research, we investigate the use of Semantic Web technologies to assist teachers in overcoming this problem. In particular we investigate the following problems with forming groups: • Describing the students: how do we describe the students in a way that is meaningful to the group formation. • Specifying and satisfying the constraints: how do we model the constraints for the different collaboration goals, and how can we form optimal groups by satisfying the given constraints. • Avoiding “Orphan Students”: when assigning students to groups, some students remain unassigned to any groups, often because some constraint has been violated. This problem is known as the orphan students. • Handling the formation with incomplete data: If the students do not provide the relevant data, how do we ensure that the formation is still efficient. We know that the Semantic Web aims at providing a promising foundation for enriching resources with well defined meanings and inferring new data from existing one. Therefore, we study the use of Semantic Web technologies and mainly ontologies and deduction rules in describing students and handling incomplete data in constraint-based group formation. The challenges of the research reside in applying the potential of the Semantic Web is real life applications such as forming groups for learning; especially with the growing use of collaboration applications over the Web.