Using Educational Resources to Improve the Efficiency of Web Searches for Additional Learning Material

The Internet is an invaluable source of information that can and should be used to help education. One of the possibilities of Internet in this area is the search for resources that complement the learning process, usually done with the support of the search engines. This search is generally performed using keywords, which implies on contextless results. This work uses information extraction techniques applied to educational resources to expand the queries done by students, adding contextual information in the search and thus recovering more appropriate educational resources. A prototype was developed according to the proposed architecture and a case study conducted in a Brazilian university presented results showing that this proposal can be used in an educational environment to improve the search of educational resources.