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del Campo, Mª Elena; Saneiro, Mar; Santos, Olga C.; Boticario, Jesus G.
PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITHDISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGH A
RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, vol. 3, núm. 1, 2010, pp. 237-247 Asociación Nacional de Psicología
Evolutiva y Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores Badajoz, España

Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=349832326025

International Journal of Developmental and

Educational Psychology,
ISSN (Printed Version): 0214-9877
fvicente@unex.es
Asociación Nacional de Psicología Evolutiva y
Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores
España

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 PSICOLOGÍA POSITIVA: EDUCACIÓN Y

PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION,

APPLIED THROUGH A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED
IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Mª Elena del Campo. PH. Doctor of Psychology. Holder of University. Psychology faculty.UNED. C/ Juan del
Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid. Spain. Phone: 34-913986257. mcampo@psi.uned.es
Mar Saneiro. Degree in Psychology. Technical Researcher of aDeNu Research Group. UNED.C/ Juan del Rosal,
10, 28040 Madrid. Spain.Phone: 34-913986257. masterdiscap@psi.uned.es
Olga C. Santos. Telecommunications Engineer. R&D Technical Manager of aDeNu Research Group. UNED. C/
Juan del Rosal, 16. 28040 Madrid. Spain. Phone: 34-913989388 ocsantos@dia.uned.es.
Jesus G. Boticario. PH. Doctor of Physical. Holder of University. Technical colleges of computing UNED.
Manager of aDeNu Research Group. UNED. C/ Juan del Rosal, 16, 28040 Madrid. Spain.
Phone: 34-913987197 jgb@dia.uned.es

ABSTRACT
The psycho-educational support for students with disabilities is a constant need along the educa- tional stages,
regardless which teaching methodology is used. When the support is provided through the Web, different
characteristics from the traditional learning process have to be considered. In par- ticular, physical and
cognitive barriers on the resources offered through the e-learning platforms appear. In this paper, we focus on
providing the required psycho-educational support drawing on the analysis of the specific difficulties
encountered by these students as a result of the functional diversity issues inherent to their disabilities. The
goal is to advise the trainee to improve the learning strategies, capac- ities and competences that are lacking or
inadequate to address tasks demands proposed in a given learning environment. In order to facilitate the
psycho-educational support the following issues have been provided: i) a psycho-educational support service
integrated in a VLE ii) a semantic educational recommender system that can be integrated into e-learning
platforms and iii) a user centered method- ology to help the educator in the design of recommendations that
address the psycho-educational needs previously identified. The support is provided both to tutors (when
preparing the contents) and to students (when interacting in the course).

KEYWORDS: Dynamic and adaptive psycho-educational support, disabilities; personalization learn- ing
strategies and scenarios; e-learning platforms; semantic educational recommender system.

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PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGH
A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

1. INTRODUCTION
The objective of this paper is to present a suitable framework for the psycho-educational support of
students with disabilities in higher education considering their educational special needs in a virtual learning
environment (VLE).
When the teaching/learning methodology is carried out through the web, different characteristics from the
traditional learning process have to be taken into account. From a psycho-educational per- spective there are
some factors related to the VLE usability and accessibility features that should be con- sidered because otherwise
the methodology, which is mediated by technology, will turn into a barrier to teaching and learning. The main
factors are:
sensuality of the user interface (Hofmeester et al. 1996; Nielsen 1995)
adjustment of the tasks, controllability, privacy, user subjective satisfaction, efficiency, personaliza- tion
possibilities, adaptation to learning capabilities (Schneiderman,1998).
In addition, VLE should be adapted to the user’s physical, cognitive and perceptual abilities and lim- itations,
facilitating the accomplishment of the different social and academic tasks posed to the learner. In order to
minimize or remove the obstacles and barriers faced by students with disabilities, a psycho- educational support
service has been designed and integrated in the accessible OpenACS/dotLRN VLE (Santos et al., 2007).
Furthermore an adapted course compliant with IMS Learning Design specification (IMS-LD) has been developed.
IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) (IMS, 2003) is able to use any psycho- educational model and describe a full
learning flow with several elements (roles, activities, environ- ments, resources, properties, conditions,
monitoring services or notifications) (Koper & Tattersall, 2005). IMS-LD supports eight different kinds of
Adaptation being carried out in eLearning systems (Burgos et al., 2007): Interface based, Learning flow based,
Content based, Interactive problem solving support, Adaptive information filtering, User grouping and
evaluation, and Changes on-the-fly (Van Rosmalen & Boticario, 2005).
In the next section we describe the main actions developed to facilitate psycho-educational support in a VLE.
To illustrate how the support to students with disabilities will be offered, a learning scenario considering the
different roles involved in Higher Education is described in the following section. Finally this paper will present
the elicitation methodology of a recommender system that will complement the support facilitated by the
Psycho-educational Support service (APES).

2. THE PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT

The psycho-educational support is mediated by the Adaptive Psycho-Educational Support service (APES)
which is provided by the OpenACS/dotLRN LMS through an adapted course compliant with IMS Learning Design
specification (IMS-LD) and complemented with the dynamic guidance provided by a semantic educational
recommender system.
2.1 Development and integration of APES into the OpenACS/dotLRN LMS
The e-learning platform offers psycho-educational support to students with and without disability through
APES. The APES service facilitates support to different roles involved along the learning process
(tutor/teacher, students, staff….) in terms of different topics that could impact on the student´s academic
performance (e.g. learning strategies, communication abilities, writing and reading difficul- ties, adapted
format and contents according to the students needs and preferences, etc). The service consist of specific sections
providing orientations, guidelines, orientations and information related to the activities carried out by each
role along the VLE.
The APES service is linked to other services offered by the VLE, such as the Needs Assessment Support
(NAS) service used to collect information about the learner’s psycho-educational needs and preferences, the
Resource Accessibility Information (RESACCINFO) service that allows to check the learning content and
resources accessibility, the Adaptation Look up (APTLOOKUP) service that offers orientation on who and how
the learning content can be adapted, and the Applied Psychological Service (APS) that is to be contacted by the
learner or tutor when they meet difficulties that cannot be solved using APES and need face to face psycho-
educational support provided by a psychological expert.

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2.2. The IMS-LD adapted course

As aforementioned an IMS-LD compliant adapted course has been designed. IMS-LD courses can be
deployed into any VLE that supports this specification (e.g. OpenACS/dotLRN). To offer a personal- ized service,
the course considers the information about the learners and tutors stored in the user mode (UM). Technical details
on the framework proposed are provided elsewhere (Santos et al., 2010).
The learner accesses and fills in the questionnaires about his/her needs through the NAS service, the user
model stores these properties together with other properties such as the learning style or the technological
experience using the platform. Taking into account this information, the learner is given access to a course with
activities and resources personalized according to the student’s profile. The course will enable the learner to
learn about the VLE itself and experience the functioning and the avail- able resources.
Moreover, the course contents and the resources offered have been designed according to the reusability
criterion, which is meant to support learning needs that may arise in different types of dis- abilities. Learners
share some learning difficulties when they are accessing both learning contents and services (e.g. information
processing, memory, reasoning, attention, language and understanding prob- lems). Cognitive processes can be
functioning in a poor or inadequate way due to their own character- istics, which are imposed by their disabilities
(Lerner, J., 1997). As consequence, learners are missing relevant information to solve problems in the
academic and real world context.
Taking into account that information, specific support has been designed and integrated into the course.
Learning strategies such as cognitive, meta-cognitive, interaction, communication and affective strategies have
been considered along the learning flow and applied to the units of learning, resources, activities and assessment.
These learning strategies are collected in a taxonomy elaborated by some co- authors from the review of
taxonomies by different authors and perspectives (Bloom, B.S., et al. 1984), (Ellis, E.S. 1993), (Woloshyn, V.E.,
& Willoughby, T., 1995), (Boulet A., Savoie-Zajc L., Chevrier J., 1996), (Johnson, L.A., Graham, S., & Harris,
K.R. 1997), (Carmel, D. and Markovitch,S. 1998), (Ridley, D.S,1992).
In general the targeted learners receive the following resources: work schedule/organizer, study register,
adapted learning materials (e.g. shorter lessons, content in video and /or audio format, mate- rial enriched with
icons, easy reading), glossary of the services/resources available at the platform, glossary of specific terms
related with the unit’s content, forum for comprehension/writing support, conceptual maps, adapted
evaluations (true-false, matching, multiple choice, short answer..).
2.3. Development and integration of a Recommender System
As it is justified in Rodriguez-Ascaso et al. (2008) the aforementioned adapted course is not suffi- cient to
support the students since the personalization support should be provided by combining design and runtime
adaptations (Boticario and Santos, 2007). For this reason, the psycho-educational support is complemented with
the usage of a recommender system (RS).
Next, we present a scenario in order to show the links between the APES service and the RS, and how the
later is integrated into the psycho-educational support facilitated by APES, offering dynamic support to the
different roles involved in the teaching/learning process. In the fourth section, we com- ment on the
Recommender system in more detail.

3. THE SCENARIO
The selected scenario collect the most typical activities carried out by the aforementioned roles involved
in Higher Education when supporting the students with disabilities according to their specific educational needs.
The APES service is related to the different services already mentioned as described in Fig. 1.

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PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGH
A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Figure 1. General description of APES

Next we comment on the scenario flow for the three roles identified: i) students with disabilities or
foreign students, ii) virtual tutors, and iii) the university staff.
3.1 The Teacher/tutor flow
When the enrolment process is over, the tutor/teacher of a virtual course receives a notification with the list of
the students with and without disability enrolled in the course. The received report contains specific
information about the accessibility preferences and psycho-educational needs informed by the students collected
by the NAS service. In particular, in the scenario presented here, a student with dis- ability is enrolled in the
course. At that moment, the RS recommends the tutor to access the APES serv- ice to learn how to address the
psycho-educational needs of that learner. The APES service provides the tutor with:
General information about different education needs and the main difficulties that the student could find in
the different academic activities depending of her/his disability (e.g. math, writing and reading, etc).
Guidelines on how to improve and create adapted content involving learning strategies in order to optimize
the student´s performance (e.g. creating alternative activities, adapting a presentation in an easy reading
format, using pictures to illustrate concepts, etc), alternative learning flows, integrating additional
resources…
Link with the Applied Psychology Service (APS) in order to get a more specialized support about the
special education needs.
After the tutor has accessed the APES service, the RS recommends the tutor to go to RESACCIN- FO service
to check if the learning materials (text, video, presentations) that she is using in the course are accessible according
to the information collected by NAS n addition APES service has an advice remembering the tutors that they
should check their learning materials’ accessibility in order to make the needed adaptations according to
the learners’ accessibility needs.
If the tutor has accessed APES more than one week ago but she has not accessed RESACCINFO yet, the RS
recommends her go to the RESACCINFO service. In any case, the RS recommends the tutor to validate the course
contents if she should provide the contents in less than one month and she has not validated them yet in the
RESACCINFO service.
As a result, the teacher/tutor should go to RESACCINFO and validates the course materials’ acces- sibility.
After that, she receives a notification pointing out the pending learning materials’ adaptations. For instance, if
there are some contents pending of adaptation, the tutor should go to the ADAPT- LOOKUP service to find
out how she can solve the problem. This service offers her two ways to adapt the learning materials. The first one
is using the Resource Adaptation Management (RESADAPT) serv- ice that will send the materials to a
specialized department or institution (e.g. National Organization of

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Spanish Blinded People –ONCE- and the Audio Visual Media Spanish Center -CEMAV-). The second one is to
make the adaptation herself, in case she has been trained for it in the past.
After RESACCINFO informs tutor on pending learning materials´ adaptations and considering the psycho-
educational orientations facilitated by APES, in this scenario the tutor/teacher decides to offer two versions of the
course. The first one is the original version of the course –that is, the course with- out the adaptations provided
in IMS-LD- with the RS integrated. In this way, if the learner does not suc- ceed in the activities and
questionnaires, the RS recommends her the possibility to follow the adapted version of the course that could
address her learning difficulties. In any case, the learner also receives recommendations pointing to internal or
external resources, alternative activities, and actions on the course services that are most appropriate in each
situation in the course. The second version is the adapted version commented previously in section 2.1. This
adapted version will be elaborated by the tutor using the IMS-LD specification where different adaptations and
resources have been considered (e.g. easy reading, videos with subtitles, glossaries, assessment with short
question…) including the pending adaptations reported by RESACCINFO, and specific recommendations
produced by the RS pointing to internal or external resources, alternative activities and services.
After the adaptations are over –no matter if they have been produced externally or by the tutor her- self-, the
tutor resubmits the learning material to RESACCINFO to validate if the new adaptations that have been made are
adequate. If RESACCINFO service confirms that there are no pending adaptation, then the tutor can update the
learning material into the platform and send a message to the course forum indicating that there is available an
adapted course version that could be used by different users sharing some learning difficulties (e.g. students
with dyslexia, attention deficit, auditory impairment, foreign students). The course has a forum that can be
used by students to solve their doubts. If the tutor/teacher detects in runtime that some students could benefit
from the adapted course version, she can suggest them to take this one.
3.2 The learner flow
The students can access to APES in different ways: 1) directly, 2) from NAS and 3) from APS. In the
three cases APES provides them with a set of common resources:
General information divided into different sections according to the different types of disability and the main
learning difficulties that they could find in the different academic and administrative activities (e.g. writing and
reading, social participation, presentations, math, etc.).
Information and description about learning strategies that could improve the academic performance according
to his learning styles and educational needs (e.g. planning, organizing, self-monitoring, how to improve her
writing and reading abilities, how to optimize her social participation, etc).
A list of adapted courses (including their characteristics) where the student can check if there is available
an adapted version of the course where he is enrolled suitable to his needs and preferences (e.g. the course
“Discovering the platform).
The possibility to contact with the APS in order to get a more personalized evaluation of his psy- cho-
educational needs.
Specific information depending on the access way is illustrated in the following sections.
3.2.1 Accessing from NAS service
After the learner is enrolled, the NAS service offers him some questionnaires that collect informa- tion about
her accessibility preferences and psycho-educational needs. This information is stored in the UM to facilitate the
adequate adaptation according to her profile. Taking into account the information collected by NAS and
stored in the UM, the RS recommends him to go to APES because it would be useful for him to read about
his learning difficulties and how to deal with them. Specifically, APES will offer information collected in
the aforementioned common resources.
3.2.2 Accessing from APS
The student is enrolled in the course and he is already aware of some of his learning difficulties, so he
consults the psycho-educational support offered by the Applied Psychology Service. He is then eval-

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PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGH
A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

uated by the educational psychologist. The expert considers that his learning difficulties do not need a psycho-
educational intervention but it could be beneficial for him to receive some orientations in order to improve her
attention difficulties. Accordingly the psycho-educational tells him to check the resources available in APES.
Specifically, APES will offer information collected in the aforementioned
mm n r r .
3.2.3 Accessing to APES directly
A foreign student enrolled in the course has some difficulties when he is reading and writing in Spanish.
He knows some of his difficulties and decides to check the psycho-educational support offered by APES. In this
case the service provides him with general information about the learning difficulties encountered by foreign
students when learning in a second language and learning strategies that could improve his reading and writing
abilities in a second language.
3.3 The staff work flow
The APES service can also be accessed from the administrative departments. In this case, a uni- versity
administrative officer who is attending the students in the enrolment process may be interested in using this
service. For instance, if she is unconfident in dealing with students with disabilities as she does not know how to
speak to them, how to support them when they are asking or filling information, etc. She may be responsible for
making and uploading contents to the institutional website using dif- ferent administrative forms and would
require checking the accessibility of the materials produced. Due to these needs she accesses APES to get
information and training to deal with those issues. In this case APES will offer her information collected in the
aforementioned common resources like general infor- mation about learning difficulties related to disabilities
with a description of the main difficulties that these students could find in administrative processes (e.g. filling
an administrative form because they do not understand the formal administrative language or the form is
inaccessible). In addition she could check guidelines about how to deal with disabled students, including
descriptions of the main difficul- ties that they could find in social interactions (e.g. student with disability
interacting with administrative staff in poor lighting conditions, noisy environment, etc).
Moreover APES provides an advice reminding her that she should check out through RESACCINFO if the
administrative materials match up with the student accessibility to make the required adaptations when needed.
Thus the administrative officer is able to adapt the forms following the APES recom- mendations. In case she
needs an adapted version of an institutional video uploaded into the universi- ty website, she can resort to
RESACCINFO. The adaptation process will follow the steps described for teacher/tutor in the section 3.1. In
that case, as she has not prior training, she decides to ask for the required adaptations using RESADAPT. Once the
resource is adapted and validated by RESACCINFO she can upload the adapted video into the institutional
website.

4. THE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM

At aDeNu research group we have developed a semantic recommender system that is based on a
recommendations model (Santos & Boticario, 2008). This model supports the course designer in describing
recommendations in learning inclusive scenarios, presents additional information to the user to explain why a
particular recommendation has been offered, and requests explicit feedback from the learner when she has shown
interest in the recommendation process -to improve the recommender-.
In particular, this modeling of the recommendations describes i) what should be recommended (dif- ferent
recommendation types have been identified and can be offered, which relate to the actions that can be done on the
VLE objects, such as send a forum message, work on a particular objective or share some opinion), ii) when a
recommendation it is deemed appropriate (considering the user and course context, the conditions of application
and the timeout restrictions), iii) how a recommendation should be displayed (considering accessibility and
usability criteria) and iv) why a recommendation has been produced (in terms of what category the
recommendation applies to, what technique has been used to generate it, and the source that originated the
recommendation).

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In order to produce semantic recommendations according to the model, a user centered method- ology has
been proposed (Santos et al., 2009). This methodology applies scenario-based methods (Rosson & Carroll,
2001) to involve psycho-educational experts in writing stories (i.e. scenarios) about the problems taking place in
relevant situations that come to their mind during their teaching experi- ence within the VLE.
Once recommendations have been designed, they can be displayed to the user in the VLE by using the
information of the model. The idea is to show the recommendations as a list of actions that the user can carry out
in the system. Each element of the list (i.e. action) contains a link to the service of the platform where the
recommended action can be taken. The user can decide whether to read the rec- ommendations or not (and of
course, once read, she also has the freedom whether to follow them or not). The following figure shows how
the recommendations list is presented to the user within the VLE, in the same way as other more traditional e-
learning services, such as a collaborative forum and some learning materials.

Figure 2. Recommendations within the e-learning platform

The RS is involved in the adaptive psycho-educational support service (dynamic guidance) as described
in the scenario introduced in section 3. Following the methodology proposed above to elicit recommendations,
several recommendations were identified to offer the dynamic guidance in APES, which are shown next. The
recommendations address the different roles identified in the scenario. So far, we have focused on the tutor
and learner roles
4.1 Recommendations for tutors
The recommendations for tutors have been defined to support the tutors in the process of prepar- ing the
materials for their courses in a way that suit the needs of their students. The following five rec- ommendations
have been identified.

Table 1 Recommendation for the APES service

Recommendation 1: Recommend a tutor to access APES to learn how to address the
learning difficulties of some of the course learners
What is recommended The APES service
When is recommended When a tutor has some learners with learning difficulties (e.g.
attention deficit or difficulties with reading comprehension)
How is recommended A link to the homepage to the APES service (in order to
facilitate where the information is, the tutor is not linked to
the specific page but to the home of the APES service, and
told in
the recommendation to go to that particular contents)
Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have learning
difficulties, so the tutor is recommended the APES service to

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Table 2 Recommendation for specific contents in the APES service

Recommendation 2: Recommend a tutor to access the specific APES contents of the

APES service to a tutor to learn how to address the learning difficulties of some of
the course learners
What is recommended A specific content in the APES service
When is recommended When a tutor has some learners with learning difficulties (e.g.
attention deficit or difficulties with reading comprehension),
she has been recommended to go to APES but she has not
accessed it in the last week
How is recommended A link to a specific content in the APES service
Why is recommended The tutor was recommended to go to the APES so she reads
some specific content, but it has not gone for a week since the
recommendation was clicked.

Table 3 Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service

Recommendation 3: Recommend the tutor to access RESACCINFO to validate the

contents produced by her
What is recommended The RESACCINFO service
When is recommended When a tutor has a course with learners with learning
difficulties and has accessed the APES service more than one
week ago but she still has to go to the RESACCINFO service
How is recommended A link to the RESACCINFO service homepage
Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have learning
difficulties, the tutor has visited the page on APES focused on
deficit attention needs more than one week ago but she has
not visited RESACCINFO homepage yet.

Table 4 Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service (deadline approaching)

Recommendation 4: Recommend the tutor to access RESACCINFO to validate the

contents produced by her (when the deadline is approaching)
What is recommended The RESACCINFO service
When is recommended When a tutor has a course with learners with learning
difficulties and has accessed the APES service more than one
week ago but she still has to go to the RESACCINFO service
and the deadline to hand the contents is approaching
How is recommended A link to the RESACCINFO service homepage
Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have reading and

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Table 5 Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service (deadline approaching)

Recommendation 5: Recommend a tutor to access ADAPTALOOKUP as there are

no captions in some of the course contents
What is recommended The ADAPTALOOKUP service
When is recommended When a tutor has validated a course that lacks of captions in
some of the contents
How is recommended A link to the ADAPTALOOKUP service homepage
Why is recommended There are some contents in the course with missing caption,
so you should go to ADAPTLOOKUP to find out how you
can solve the problem.

4.2 Recommendations for learners

Following the scenario, learners can be supported both inside and outside the course. In the first case,
they are helped to deal with their learning needs. In the second case, when students are interact- ing in the course,
the recommender system guides the students in their learning by recommending actions to take in the VLE
(i.e. within a learning scenario) that best adapt –in each every moment- to their profile and needs (e.g.
accessibility preferences), taking into account at the same time their progress in the course. Table 6 presents
sample recommendations of each type.

Table 6 Recommendation for the APES service

Recommendation 6: Recommend a learner that has learning difficulties to go to

APES
What is recommended The APES service
When is recommended When the learner has some learning difficulties
How is recommended A link to the APES service homepage
Why is recommended The learner has learning difficulties, so she can be benefited
from reading how to improve her learning by reading the
information provided in APES

Table 7 Recommendation to use the forum

Recommendation 7: Recommend a learner with comprehension and reading needs

to post a message in the forum to present herself
What is recommended The forum tool
When is recommended When the learner has some learning difficulties and has not
yet used the forum to present herself in this course
How is recommended A link to the forum tool in the course space
Why is recommended The learner has comprehension and reading needs, so she
may have problems to communicate to fellows, therfore it
would be better to motivate her to post a message in the
forum to introduce herself, if she has not posted any message
yet in the course.

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A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

5. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented how psycho-educational support can be offered through the Adaptive
Psycho-Educational Support service (APES) in the OpenACS/dotLRN VLE through an adapted IMS Learning
Design compliant course and complemented with the dynamic guidance provided by a semantic educational
recommender system. To illustrate our approach, we have presented a typical sce- nario in higher education
universities that covers the psycho-educational requirements to support stu- dents with disabilities.
This psycho-educational support for disabled students can be applied through a recommender sys- tem, which
is built upon a semantic recommendations model and integrated into the VLE. A user cen- tered methodology has
been used to help the educator design recommendations that address the psy- cho-educational needs identified. In
this way, the recommender system provides personalized recom- mendations to guide the tutors in the contents
preparation and the students in their learning by recom- mending actions to carry out in the platform.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Authors would like to thank the European Commission and the Spanish Government for funding the research
involved in this work. In particular EU4ALL (IST-2006-034778) and A2UN@ (TIN2008-06862- C04-01/TSI)
projects. Moreover, they would also like to acknowledge the work carried out by Alejandro Rodriguez-Ascaso in
the definition of the services, the work carried out by Manuel Montecelo from aDeNu group who arranged the
course contents using the IMS-LD specification following the require- ments provided to him by the psycho-
educational co-authors and the development work carried out by Emmanuelle Raffenne, who made possible the
integration of the IMS-LD player of the OpenACS/dotLRN platform with the User Model developed in
aDeNu group.

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Fecha de recepción: 1 de marzo 2010

Fecha de admisión: 19 de marzo 2010

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