A Content-Based Approach for Supporting Teachers in Discovering Dependency Relationships Between Instructional Units in Distance Learning Environments

eLearning courses are usually built in such a way that training resources are organized for making the learning process effective. In most cases, the top-level learning objective will have prerequisites which must be satisfied. Those prerequisites should be formally identified by a hierarchy of dependencies built accordingly. We evaluate a series of hypotheses for understanding the feasibility of automating this task by means of a general-purpose content-based approach that exploits semantic analysis techniques. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015