ASK-eEDCOM: Enhancing educational portals through capturing collective knowledge of web-based learning communities

In this paper, we discuss how the learning object paradigm can be exploited to support web-based learning communities and on-line communities of practice, as a mean to enhance the services already, provided by Educational Portals (EP). It is claimed that this can be achieved by motivating the active interaction of community, members with the EPs' resources and at the same time allowing the dynamic update the available resources taking into account the community's collective knowledge on the real use of the resources. To this end, we present the ASK-eEDCOM, a web-based environment for the empowerment of on-line educational communities.