Valuing Learning Objects Shared in an Online Community

In this chapter, the authors analyze and discuss how the activity inside a social network impacts on the value of a Learning Object (LO) used in a collaborative e-learning platform. Recent works propose metrics for measuring LO reusability based on a variety of approaches. In this work, they combine and extend these approaches in order to design a valuation strategy which helps to identify the usage of LOs inside a social network. Their proposal is to identify the factors that are relevant for the valuation of a LO and determine which of them can be computed automatically from its context of usage, the level of success of its authors and its metadata. The authors’ analysis was performed on a particular social network called LOP (LO Poll) system, which strongly motivates the creation and collaborative valuation of LOs. They present preliminary conclusions obtained from an experiment performed in order to analyze the feasibility of the proposal.