A social network-based teacher model to support course construction

On line education is a student centred activity, and most of the research in this field focuses on students; yet the quality of teaching is undoubtedly the basic ingredient for a successful learning. In particular, fostering new forms of collaboration between students and teachers, i.e. pursuing co-learning aspects of e-learning, probably needs giving teachers new means of collaboration, also among themselves. In this paper, we tackle the aim of providing the teacher with social collaboration tools, to support the process of course construction. Such a process comprises several distinct steps, from concept mapping, through selection of suitable learning material, to the final stages of delivery in a Learning Management System. It is an heavy process, through which teachers have to spend a lot of time to build or to retrieve the right learning material from local databases or from specialized repositories on the web. The support we foresee should exploit the knowledge of the whole teaching community, in which the teacher acts, to help her/him in doing the above described job. By "knowledge" we mean basically a representation of the ways of usage of learning materials, by the teachers in the community for their courses. To start on a solid footing, here we address the topic of modeling the teacher. The model we define aims to give teachers a personalized support, encompassing consideration for their own pedagogy, teaching styles, and teaching experience during course creation. It is deemed to consider all those issues in a dynamic way and to guide the teacher towards the best didactic choices.