e-Teaching Assistant : A Social Intelligent Platform Supporting Teachers in the Collaborative Creation of Courses

With the ambition of providing teachers with a concrete tool for worldwide exploiting didactic contents to feature their courses, we face the problem of creating a social platform with adequate functionalities to satisfy the teacher expectations. Starting with a well designed architecture we endow it with three key functionalities that become the stakeholders of the emerging social network: 1) a quality system ensuring the value of the materials the users put in the platform repository as their contribution to the social business, 2) a recommender system based on computational intelligence techniques constituting the principal tool to guide teachers along the assembling of materials into courses, and 3) a gamification system, root of the no-profit business plan of the platform, to involve teachers in the social network. As a result we delineate an ecosystem where teachers exploit contents of a repository to which contribute by themselves. They are encouraged in exploiting and contributing because the contents are of high quality; they are wisely assisted in the exploration of the repository by platform services yet under their full control; and they are variously reworded by this involvement.