Blended Learning Concept in Selected Tourism Management e-Courses with Focus on Content Development Including Recommender System

The paper covers two main areas that intertwine each other: content development of e-courses and recommender system with blended learning concept that spans over both themes. This paper approaches the educators’ question on how to enhance learning, in this case from the perspective of improvement of students’ learning performance by proper guiding in the virtual platform. There were two influencing stimuli for innovative changes in the e-courses on culture, geography and history of English speaking countries within the frame of Management of Tourism bachelor programme. Firstly, a recommender system was designed so that the great amount of study materials in the e-courses could be properly reorganized and clarified. The second stimuli was connected with the change of language subjects status from compulsory to voluntary subjects and inevitable drop of students’ language competences and interest in language subjects because economic and managerial subject became preferential. Since the e-learning platform doesn’t allow implementation of the advance recommendation system which enables, for example, algorithm for calculating the weight of documents, it was necessary to create a similar model using the available resources as the analyses of student attendance and number of downloads and evaluation. The result is an effective model that does not require a more advanced e-learning portal and, to a smaller amount, can be done by the instructor manually, and provides effective content filtering in the e-course. Students appreciated the fact that they do not have to decide which material is sufficient for their study. Appropriateness of the model was demonstrated by reduced failure rate.