What is CERSEI?

CERSEI stands for "Cognitive Effort based Recommender System for Enhancing Inclusiveness". The word "cersei" is a variant of "circe", which comes from the Greek "kirke" and means "falcon" or "hawk", hence the falcon head logo. This is also the name of a Greek Goddess, who is a master of transformation in the Greek Mythology. Although her story is a little peculiar, especially the part with Odysseus and his men on Aiaia, we think the analogy of divine transformation fits well the educational context.

The platform itself is being developed in the context of a research collaboration between the KMi group at the Open University and the BIRD group at the Université de Lorraine. The goal of the project is to study how different categories of students exert effort and how effort-based recommendations of activities impact different categories of students. The project is currently at its first stage and only focuses on effort modelling. The recommender will be developped in the next stage.

The current version of the platform allows you to assign effort ratings to the activities of the TT284 module, hence the subtitle "Gym Notebook for the brain." More precisely, you can use CERSEI to (1) estimate how much effort you think would be required for you to complete the activities you have not completed yet, which we call estimated effort, and (2) keep track of the effort you exerted on previous activities, which we call actual effort.

From a research point of view, CERSEI allows us to collect subjective effort ratings, which we will later confront to behavioural and demographic data to have a richer understanding of how different categories of students exert effort while learning at the OU. The demographic data include the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), occupation, education and ethnicity, and the behavioural data include your clicks, page views, submitted work, downloaded documents and forum usage.