Learning Design Repositories – Structure Ontology and Processes

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2014

Learning designs are central resources for educational environments because they provide the organizational structure of learning activities; they are concrete instructional methods. We characterize each learning design by the competencies they target. We define competencies at the meta-knowledge level, as generic processes acting on domainspecific knowledge. We summarize a functional taxonomy of generic skills that draws upon three fields of knowledge: education, software engineering and artificial intelligence. This taxonomy provides the backbone of an ontology for learning designs, enabling the creation of a library of learning designs based on their cognitive and meta-cognitive properties.

Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence

In the last years, the growing of the Internet have opened the door to new ways of learning and education methodologies. Furthermore, the appearance of different tools and applications has increased the need for interoperable as well as reusable learning contents, teaching resources and educational tools (Wiley, 2000). Driven by this new environment, several metadata specifications describing learning resources, such as IEEE LOM (LTCS, 2002) or Dublin Core (DCMI, 2004), and learning design processes (Rawlings et al., 2002) have appeared. In this context, the term learning design is used to describe the method that enables learners to achieve learning objectives after a set of activities are carried out using the resources of an environment. From the proposed specifications, the IMS (IMS, 2003) has emerged as the de facto standard that facilitates the representation of any learning design that can be based on a wide range of pedagogical techniques. The metadata specifications are use...

JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL …, 2006

The paper describes an ontology-based framework for bridging learning design and learning object content. In present solutions, researchers have proposed conceptual models and developed tools for both of those subjects, but without detailed discussions of how they can be used together. In this paper we advocate the use of ontologies to explicitly specify all learning designs, learning objects, and the relations between them, and show how this use of ontologies can result in more effective (semi-)automatic tools and services that increase the level of reusability. We first define a three-part conceptual model that introduces an intermediate level between learning design and learning objects called the learning object context. We then use ontologies to facilitate the representation of these concepts: LOCO is a new ontology based on IMS-LD, ALOCoM is an existing ontology for learning objects, and LOCO-Cite is a new ontology for the learning object contextual model. We conclude by showing the applicability of the proposed framework in a use case study.

Distance Education, 2009

This chapter first argues that current approaches for sharing and retrieving learning objects or any other kinds of information are not efficient or scalable, essentially because almost all of these approaches are based on the manual or automatic indexation or merge of independently created formal or informal resources. It then shows that tightly interconnected collaboratively updated formal or semiformal large knowledge bases (semantic networks) can, should, and probably will, be used as a shared medium for the tasks of researching, publishing, teaching, learning, evaluating, or collaborating, and thus ease or complement traditional methods such as face-to-face teaching and document publishing. To test and support these claims, the authors have implemented their ideas into a knowledge server named WebKB-2 and begun representing their research domain and several courses at their universities. The same underlying techniques could be applied to a semantic/learning grid or peer-to-peer network.

Journal of Interactive Media in …, 2005

The paper presents an ontology based approach to integrate learning designs and learning object content. The main goal is to increase the level of reusability of learning designs by enabling the use of a given learning design with different content. We first define a threepart conceptual model that introduces an intermediary level between learning design and learning objects called the learning object context. We then use ontologies to facilitate the representation of these concepts: LOCO is a new ontology for IMS-LD, ALOCoM is an existing ontology for learning objects, and LOCO-Cite is a new ontology for the contextual model. Building the LOCO ontology required correcting some inconsistencies in the present IMS LD Information Model. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach on three use cases: finding a teaching method based on domain-related competencies, searching for learning designs based on domain-independent competencies, and creating user recommendations for both learning objects and learning designs.