My research idea in short, very short...

My interest for my PhD work is in the area of advisory models or recommendation models for learning resources in the context of a repository, and possibly also extensible of a LCMS, VLE, etc.

I currently plan to look at the 3 different models based on:
- user modeling like Amazon,
- social networking models
- evaluation criteria

The idea, most of all, relies on the fact that metadata as we used to know it (one time entry) in the context of a repository has to change; it will become more dynamic, and contain more information about the user and its actual usage.

First of all, I have to look at different advisory models that are used, and that could be applicable to the field of education. It's clear that some models used in commerce, say, might work, but not all. Education, after all, has different goals and ones very specific to it (not only to learn skills and competencies, but also higher-oder cognitive skills).

I also will have to look at the metadata and think what fields would be important for this type of data, etc.

Second, I would design a conceptual model for these different models that I come up with.

Then I have pilots with real users, hopefully from different educational communities. It would be interesting to find out whether different communities have preferences for one model or another, whether those models could better work as stand-alone or part of the same system where user could choose the one they prefer or with combining parts from here and there. and so on....