This special issue aims to gather a collection of high quality contributions that reflect the support that can be provided by Recommender Systems in Virtual Learning Communities (VLC). It focuses on the e-learning domain and the VLC that grow around it. This special issue calls for papers in the community of researchers for recommender systems in the educational domain that analyse the needs and propose solutions from a user-centred point of view. Contributions are expected to answer some of the following questions (among others):
- How recommendations can impact on the participants in VLC?
- What type of activities within the VLC could be improved or made more productive with the usage of recommender systems?
- What types of situations in VLC are meaningful for providing recommendations?
- How can the utility of a recommender system be measured in a VLC?
- What types of recommendations are of special interest for the educational domain?
- How can users be modelled to facilitate the recommendations process in VLC?
- What is the most appropriate design for a tool to manage the recommendations?

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
- Recommender systems for educational domain
- Inclusive recommendations in virtual learning communities (i.e. take into account the diversity of the users, including the accessibility preferences)
- User-centred design methods
- User-centred evaluation
- User modelling to support recommender systems for educational domain
- Personalisation and user needs in educational domain
- Design of the user interface for recommenders in virtual learning communities
- Authoring/administration tools to manage/supervise the recommendations process
- Evaluating recommendation interfaces through user studies and other human-computer interaction approaches
- Recommenders to support social networking in virtual learning communities
- Case studies of recommenders in virtual learning communities
- Evaluation of recommender systems in educational scenarios

Important dates
- Notification of Intent to Submit: as soon as possible
- Submission of Title and Extended Abstract deadline: 28 February, 2010
- Full paper submission deadline: 30 March, 2010

For further information please see: http://adenu.ia.uned.es/web/es/rs4vlc

Notification of intent to submit and submission of the title and extended abstract should be done directly to Olga C. Santos (ocsantos@dia.uned.es) in the form of a PDF file attached to the e-mail.