# A Collaborative Framework for Customized E-Learning Services by Analytic Hierarchy Processing
## 1 Introduction  
The rapid growth of the Internet with cloud services has accelerated the speed of knowledge creation and delivery. It also offers an efficient way for scholars and scientists to pool information and share knowledge through cyberspace. To catch up with the evolution of progressive technologies, people have to keep on learning new knowledge continuously. That inspires enterprises to establish e-learning Websites for versatile knowledge workers, and these platforms have been gradually recognized as effective and important media for lifelong learning in the past decade. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more courses have been transferred or moved to the Internet as online courses, the e-learning service is supposed to be increasingly popular in the future, with an ever-increasing number of digitized courses cropping up everywhere in cyberspace. However, most of the traditional online learning structures provide little ways of interaction between instructors and learners, where course contents are usually unilaterally presented, and often seem to be just delivering _information_ instead of delivering _learning_. Therefore, due to the deficiencies of tutoring and guiding functionalities in such learning platforms, casual learners may deviate from the original course direction, or even lose their ways on the road of advancement, when confronting inflexible learning models. We believe the most important key factor to make personal e-learning services successful is to offer a nimble mechanism for casual learners to establish their owncustomized learning platforms with auxiliary guidance, such that casual learners are free from deviation of the original course direction, or learning with frustration. As pointed out by [PERSON] [1], Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is becoming a promising concept driven by the emergence of ubiquitous computing technology and the development of social media software. As personal learning takes place in different contexts and situations, and is not provided by a single learning provider, PLE is not supposed to be only a software application. Instead, it was more of a new approach to using technologies for learning. In this paper, based on the concept of the Analytical Hierarchy Processing (AHP) model [2], we intend to propose a highly flexible framework for the next generation of PLE e-learning environment, which will be interchangeably regarded as _E-learning 2.0_ in the following (although such a preliminary concept has been expounded by [PERSON] (2005) [3] and [PERSON] (2006) [4]). Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP) is a well-known methodology invented by [PERSON] (1980) [2], used for making complex decisions with benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks, and for combining them to obtain an overall outcome. AHP can be combined with other models for multi-criteria decision support; e.g., fuzzy AHP [5] is a combination of AHP with fuzzy set preference modeling, fuzzy multiple attribute decision-making methods [6], or other multiple criteria decision methods [7]. The most important functionality for a PLE is the process that adaptively provides a versatile course portfolio scheme for different learners from different perspectives. That is, the main objective of a PLE is to transform a learner from a role of passively accepting the course content organized by instructors, into a different role of proactively selecting the customized courses and contributing their knowledge to continuously improve the learning platform. The proposed scheme expedites the flexibility of lifelong learning according to the users' background and their requirements in a more flexible way. We are aware that changing technologies are playing important roles as key drivers in educational change in the post-COVID-19 era. To make our discussion concise, this paper will not discuss the details regarding specific pedagogy (or didactics). Instead, we concentrate on the whole approach from a technological point of view and seek the possibilities of a contribution to the ecology of PLE.