Sequencing wikipedia pages: An on-the-fly approach to course building

With its 5,006,202 articles, 49 millions of registered people and on average 800 new articles per day, Wikipedia provides a knowledge base for teachers and instructional designers to build didactic materials. As a matter of fact, teachers often consult this encyclopaedia to arrange, integrate or enrich their courses. Moreover, with the exponential growth of the Internet, didactic materials are freely available and usable by teachers, instructional designers and students from Learning Objects Repositories such as Mertlot or Ariadne and others. On the other hand, designing and delivering a new course is a crucial task for teachers, who have to face two main problems: building or retrieving and sequencing learning materials. Retrieving or building learning materials requires a great effort and is time-consuming, while sequencing requires an accurate didactic project. In this paper we present a sequencing engine of learning materials, embedded in the Wiki Course Builder system, a system capable of retrieving and sequencing Wikipedia web pages, taking into account both the teacher model based on the Grasha teaching styles and on a social didactic approach. The main goal is to support teachers building on-the-fly courses, i.e., building courses quickly, with a few clicks of the mouse. An important feature of the system is represented by its ability to allow teachers to interact with the recommended learning path through a graph-based interface where they can directly modify the proposed learning path, adding or deleting Wikipedia pages. A first questionnaire has been submitted to a sample of teachers with encouraging results.