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The retrieval and composition of educational material are topics that attract many studies from the field of Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence. The Web is gradually gaining popularity among teachers and students as a source of learning resources. This transition is, however, facing skepticism from some scholars in the field of education. The main concern is about the quality and reliability of the teaching on the Web. While online educational repositories are explicitly built for educational purposes by competent teachers, web pages are designed and created for offering different services, not only education. In this study, we analyse if the Internet is a good source of teaching material compared to the currently available repositories in education. Using a collection of 50 queries related to educational topics, we compare how many useful learning resources a teacher can retrieve in Google and three popular learning object repositories. The results are very insightful and in favour of Google supported by the t-tests. For most of the queries, Google retrieves a larger number of useful web pages than the repositories (\(p < .01\)), and no queries resulted in zero useful items. Instead, the repositories struggle to find even one relevant material for many queries. This study is clear evidence that even though the repositories offer a richer description of the learning resources through metadata, it is time to undertake more research towards the retrieval of web pages for educational applications.

This paper presents a newborn collaboration between heterogeneous AI competences. In particular, it describes current work on the integration of machine learning techniques for the automatic generation of contents for an Intelligent Tutoring System grounded on automated planning techniques. The joint use of these two approaches allows on the one hand to facilitate the task of instructional designers in defining and preparing courses, and on the other hand to dynamically support the use of content according to different users context.

Wikipedia has become the mostused source of didactic materials with its immense number of Wiki pages,freely available to anyone. Wiki Course Builder is a Web platform designed to help teachers building courses composed by Wikipedia pages only,directly taken by the Wikipedia free encyclopedia.One of the interesting and novel features is the Community module, that provides a collaborative environment, through a suitable Graphic User Interface, where teachers can interact with all the courses in the platform. The Community is a graphical visualization of the Wikipedia pages used by all the teachers in the systems, grouped in clusters, each representing a particular topic. Another characteristic is the information about the Teaching Styles of those teachers that have used that page in their courses. This feature has a twofold advantage. First, each Wikipedia page is tagged with the Teaching Styles. Second, this social aspect gives useful suggestions for possible extensions or changes in the courses. We present a complete use case showing the usefulness of the social Community environment to speed up and improve the course building activity.