Elearning: Coupling Course Management Systems and Dynamic Taxonomies

In elearning environments, with large content bases, dynamic taxonomies are a powerful retrieval system for finding out, through one or more steps, what the user is asking for. But their use also plays an active role in suggesting orthogonal visits to available learning resources by exploiting associations the user would not have thought about. These two roles of dynamic taxonomies are important in finding out what can be of interest both for a teacher using the searching engine to retrieve suggestions for a presentation or a homework or an unusual way of presenting a subject and for the students visiting the learning environment while, as an example, training for an examination. Here we describe the prototype of a system conceived to integrate dynamic taxonomies and MOODLE, a Course Management System developed since early nineties as a web tool for cooperative learning. Supporting helpful search mechanisms is important in tools for cooperative communities because they are based on interactions among members of the community and on a careful regard of others contributions. As a mechanism for harvesting the different kind of resources available in a cooperative system, makes one more good reason for coupling dynamic taxonomies with Moodle.