Adding tags to courses to improve evaluation: A multiplatform lcms approach that allows multidimensional analysis

The main idea of this paper consists in adding tags to the contents available in any given course materials structured according to any Learning Content Management System (LCMS). Tags, very popular in web 2.0 applications, give a free and flexible way of characterizing materials according to any criteria that a teacher can imagine. Therefore, one can use them for any specific analysis and clustering of both teaching methodology and students learning. Our approach claims to be platform independent in the sense that can be applied on top of any current LCMS. To achieve that property, we define a XML specification that includes specific, platform dependent, queries. This choice is much more efficient than building plug-ins or hardcoded solutions for any existing learning platform (and its underlying data-base). At the end of the paper, we show the powerfulness of this approach with a course example.