T-VLC: A Trust Model for Virtual Learning Communities

In the context of virtual learning communities (VLCs), where the participants may not know each other, it is necessary to have a mechanism to help when deciding who to work with and what reliable contents and information sources are. This study aims to design a generic trust model, named T-VLC, applicable to VLCs, which can be adapted to different learning scenarios. T-VLC is composed of eight factors-direct experience, reputation, role, knowledge, security, quality, institutional trust, and closeness, which, with their corresponding weights, will estimate the trust among the members of the community. T-VLC is a generic model that can be adapted to a particular educational context by adjusting the weights associated with each factor. In addition, this article presents the implementation of the model in the modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (Moodle) learning environment systems and describes the experimentation and results obtained in four real educational contexts.