Managing the Expertise in a Social E-Learning Environment

In the blended learning paradigm, an aware use of the technologies as well as the introduction of social aspects, allows learners to be more active during their own study and to be more involved in the practices of collaboration and knowledge sharing. In this scenario, the identification of an expert among the learners assumes a key role. An expert has a better overview of the topic and is able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information. In addition, an expert plays an active role during the practices of study with the other peers. Quantifying the value of expertise on specific topics is considered a complex task especially with the advent of the “social learning management system” (hereafter “Social LMS”), where the standard methods based on the analysis of textual information are not sufficient to manage the socialization aspect. Our intention is to go beyond these methods by exploiting the social features in order to constrain expertise. In this paper, different roles such as the formal one (e.g., grades), the social one (e.g., social evaluation of peers) and the editorial one (e.g., the skills acquired in the workflow for the creation of informal material) are combined in order to obtain a clear characterization of the concept of expertise within a Social LMS. From this innovative treatment with roles, there is an augmented vision of the spectrum related to the kind of learners according to their actions on the flows of information within a social e-learning platform. For instance, the standard view of expertise ranges from novice (or newbie) to expert while in this case one has to take into account the anti-expert (i.e., troll) whose action degrades the flows of knowledge.