Educational Hub

Abstract

In an example implementation, a global educational hub provides academic users with collaboration tools to exchange and build on the accumulated knowledge of subjects of interest. Users are provided with a central location to collect, categorize, and rank resources, and store notes and comments related to a particular section of an electronic textbook being studied. Users also can refer to online resources, such as web services, multimedia, website pages, newsgroups, search engine results, RSS, any other current and future external resources, and other user's notes.

1 .- 30 . (canceled) 
     
     
         31 . A method for facilitating collaboration between users comprising:
 obtaining, from a plurality of user devices:
 monitoring information corresponding to monitored interactions between a plurality of users and at least one electronic resource; and 
 content identified respectively by each of the plurality of users as relevant to the at least one electronic resource; 
   indexing, on a server system, the content based on the monitoring information;   parsing content from a portion of an electronic resource being displayed by a particular user's device, wherein the content is parsed into different grammatical parts-of-speech elements;   transmitting a subset of the parsed content including some, but fewer than all, of the different grammatical parts-of-speech elements from the particular user's device to the server system;   identifying indexed content relevant to the particular user based on the monitoring information and the subset of the parsed content received from the particular user's device; and   displaying, on the particular user's device, content relevant to the particular user, wherein the displayed content includes content identified by another user or a search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource.   
     
     
         32 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the at least one electronic resource is a textbook. 
     
     
         33 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant comprises another electronic resource. 
     
     
         34 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant a comment, note, or annotation created by the other user. 
     
     
         35 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource comprises a reference to another electronic source, a website, a service, a search engine result, or an advertisement. 
     
     
         36 . The method of  claim 31 , further comprising obtaining, from each user device, feedback information regarding displayed content. 
     
     
         37 . The method of  claim 36 , wherein identifying indexed content relevant to the particular user is further based on feedback information received from each user device. 
     
     
         38 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the monitoring information corresponds to an identity of at least one electronic resource. 
     
     
         39 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the monitoring information obtained from each user device corresponds to one or more key words associated with the portion of the at least one electronic resource being viewed by the respective user of the user device. 
     
     
         40 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein identifying indexed content relevant to the particular user is further based on a popularity of the content. 
     
     
         41 . The method of  claim 40 , wherein identifying indexed content relevant to the particular user is further based on the popularity of the content with respect to a subset of the plurality of users. 
     
     
         42 . The method of  claim 41 , wherein the subset of users are users who are similar with respect to at least one pre-determined criterion. 
     
     
         43 . The method of  claim 42 , wherein the criterion corresponds to an academic course currently taken by the users. 
     
     
         44 . The method of  claim 41 , wherein the criterion corresponds to an academic institution currently attended by the users. 
     
     
         45 . The method of  claim 41 , wherein the subset of users is selected by the particular user. 
     
     
         46 . A system comprising:
 one or more processors; and   a computer program product encoded on a tangible, non-transitory storage medium, the product comprising computer readable instructions for causing one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
 obtaining, from a plurality of user devices:
 monitoring information corresponding to monitored interactions between a plurality of users and at least one electronic resource; and 
 content identified respectively by each of the plurality of users as relevant to the at least one electronic resource; 
 
 indexing the content based on the monitoring information; 
 receiving a subset of content that was parsed into different grammatical parts-of-speech elements, the content representing a portion of an electronic resource being displayed by a particular user's device, wherein the subset of the content includes some, but fewer than all, of the grammatical parts-of-speech elements; 
 identifying indexed content relevant to a particular user based on the monitoring information and the subset of parsed content received from the particular user's device; and 
   transmitting, to each user's device, the content identified as relevant to that user, wherein the transmitted content includes content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource.   
     
     
         47 . The system of  claim 46 , wherein the content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource comprises another electronic resource. 
     
     
         48 . The system of  claim 46 , wherein the content identified by another user or the search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource comprises a reference to another electronic source, a website, a service, or an advertisement. 
     
     
         49 . The system of  claim 46 , wherein the monitoring information corresponds to an identity of at least one electronic resource. 
     
     
         50 . The system of  claim 46 , wherein the monitoring information obtained from each user device corresponds to one or more key words associated with a portion of the at least one electronic resource being viewed by the respective user of the user device. 
     
     
         51 . A system apparatus comprising:
 one or more processors; and   a computer program product encoded on a tangible, non-transitory storage medium, the product comprising computer readable instructions for causing one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
 monitoring interactions between a user and at least one electronic resource; 
 generating monitoring information based on the monitored interactions; 
 receiving, from the user, content identified by the user as relevant to the at least one electronic resource; 
 parsing content from a portion of an electronic resource being displayed by the apparatus, wherein the content is parsed into different grammatical parts-of-speech elements; 
 transmitting the monitoring information and a subset of the parsed content including some, but fewer than all, of the different grammatical parts-of-speech elements to a server; 
 receiving content relevant to the user from the server, wherein the content relevant to the user is identified based on the monitoring information and the subset of the parsed content received and the subset of the parsed content by the server from the apparatus; and 
   a display device configured to display the content relevant to the user, wherein the displayed content includes content identified by another user or search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource.   
     
     
         52 . The apparatus of  claim 51 , wherein the content identified by another user or search engine as relevant to the at least one electronic resource comprises a comment, note, or annotation created by the other user. 
     
     
         53 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein indexed content relevant to the particular user is identified based on at least one of:
 a linguistic dependency between two or more textual elements of the subset of the parsed content,   a proximity between two or more textual elements of the subset of the parsed content, and   an ontological meaning of one or more textual elements of the subset of the parsed content.   
     
     
         54 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein identifying indexed content relevant to the particular user comprises:
 identifying at least one textual element having a similar meaning as a textual element of the subset of the parsed content.   
     
     
         55 . The method of  claim 31 , further comprising:
 automatically parsing the content from the portion of the electronic resource being displayed by the particular user's device; and   automatically transmitting the subset of the parsed content from the particular user's device to the server system.   
     
     
         56 . The method of  claim 31 , further comprising:
 determining that a different portion of the electronic resource is being displayed by the particular user's device; and   responsive to determining that the different portion of the electronic resource is being displayed by the particular user's device, automatically displaying additional content relevant to the different portion.   
     
     
         57 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the content relevant to the particular user is displayed according to a relevance ranking. 
     
     
         58 . The method of  claim 57 , wherein the relevant ranking is determined based on at least one of the following:
 a ranking of the content received from another user,   a demographic of the particular user, and   a time that the content was published.   
     
     
         59 . The method of  claim 31 , wherein the displayed content includes content identified by an instructor or publisher of the at least one electronic resource as relevant to the at least one electronic resource, wherein the instructor or publisher is distinct from the plurality of users.