INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES TO SUSTAIN LIFELONG LEARNERS AND RELATED RECRUITMENT PROCESSES
INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES TO SUSTAIN LIFELONG LEARNERS AND RELATED RECRUITMENT PROCESSES

Summary/Abstract: Virtual communities are seen as the social fabric for learning, being present in more and more educational contexts. The communities' cohesion and, in the same time, their members' satisfaction are increased through various personalization mechanisms. Among them, an important role is played by intelligent recommendations of educational resources and tools considered useful by other community members with similar profiles. The paper presents a web-based platform that supports the process of lifelong learning through the creation of collaborative virtual communities. Both professionals and non-professional are put into connection, using a hybrid recommendation algorithm based on an ontological approach. The access to the platform is done via a professional social network account, thus increasing the accessibility of the platform and its integration in current social learning ecosystem. After logging in, all the details available in the professional social network account are imported automatically and inferences are made to recommend to the new user e-learning communities which are suitable for one's objectives. Within a community, users can interact with their peers and can receive ratings based on their activity. Thus, we claim that the platform is able to engage people to improve their knowledge in their field of activity and related fields. Besides providing the opportunity to continuous learning and professional development, the platform aims to increase the employability of lifelong learners: it increases the members' visibility to human resources recruiters and it eases the professional recruiters' access to potential employees by taking into account one's ratings within the related e-learning communities. The proposed platform is presented in the context of lifelong learning, as a driver to well-being in current society.

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