A Review Of Factors Affecting Recommender Decisions In Social Networks For Educational Purposes

There are a multiple papers focused on recommendation techniques and algorithms. However, less attention has been dedicated to social factors that influence in the recommendation process. Depending on the context where the recommendation system is applied, it is necessary to understand human and social factors that affect the output of the recommendation algorithm. This study sheds light on design and decision making of recommender system. In particular, we conducted a survey where 126 students were asked to extract which are the main factors for improving suggestions when they are interacting in an Online Social Network (OSN) or in a specific domain such as an Educational Social Network (ESN). The results show that different factors have to be considered depending on the type of the network.