Collaborative Community Knowledge Building with Personalized Question Recommendations

Inquiry-based learning focuses on asking questions and finding answers through investigation while engaging students in active learning. Decentralized knowledge building in the community can benefit from applying the approach to modern web technologies and collaboration. Distributed Noracle is a decentralized, question-based tool for building community knowledge in collaboration among participants that helps learners understand and reflect on individual learning and community processes. However, learners may encounter vast and complex space graphs, which leads to difficulties pursuing their goal of reflection and understanding the knowledge of the community. Community knowledge building is essential as it allows community members to share their knowledge and expertise. We extended the Distributed Noracle application with a recommender system that can suggest relevant questions and spaces to community members to address this problem. The recommendations can be accessed within the Distributed Noracle application or through our developed chatbot for community chat environments like Rocket.Chat or Slack. Our evaluation shows that our recommender system achieves the intended purpose and helps learners to find exciting questions in vast question spaces in a short amount of time.