OWL MODEL

OWL Model which Secures Inference when Manipulating the Semantics of Learners with Difficulties



Table of Contents

Introduction3

The Scenario4

The modelling approach 15

The modelling Approach 29

Lesson learned12

A. Deploying e-learning standards policies12

B. Software and content accessibility conformity14

C. The European Educational Area18

Conclusions20

References24

OWL Model which Secures Inference when Manipulating the Semantics of Learners with Difficulties

Introduction

The generation of educational content and design of collaborative activities has always been a big effort, especially because in many occasions the objective of the author or group of authors is to reuse existing resources and develop a complete course, including complex activities with content and user interactions (Boyle, 2003, 46-58). If the main goal of a learning object (LO) is to be used for teaching and learning, the second one in importance should be its reuse. To this end, extensive research has been carried out in the last years to standardize learning content components and collaborative interactions, to make them usable in interoperable and maintainable content repositories. To organize and help in the retrieval of the right LOs, metadata labels have been defined and standardized. But this has introduced an additional burden, namely that of annotating LOs appropriately following these metadata.

In this context, gathering educational content is a matter of two factors (a) reusability, which implies to have the resource at the appropriate level of granularity, and (b) availability, which tackles the idea of actually finding the most appropriate resource using a variety of techniques. The fact is that authoring tools usually do not implement features for these two factors and generally also lack of the appropriate abstraction level to provide an efficient way to search and retrieve content and on the other hand, a suitable way to describe learning courses at an instructional level of abstraction (Boyle, 2003, 46-58).

To overcome these problems in authoring of educational material we propose a combination of techniques to provide instructional abstraction by means of instructional layers, collaborative scripts in authoring tools and semantic web techniques for extending e-learning material in order to harness the wealth of existing web content and semantically labelled repositories (Rodríguez, 2004, 124-137).

The Scenario

From the instructional point of view, the notion of Learning Object has been extrapolated from a variety of computational paradigms like reusable component as a software engineering concept, providing structured reusable elements labelled with metadata, and also from knowledge engineering, allowing content organization using knowledge-based structures like ontologies or semantic web development. On the other hand, from the cognitive sciences perspective, the adoption during the 50s and 60s of some instructional theories based on cognition have obtained useful abstractions to specify appropriate methods and situations in which those are to be applied during learning process (Rodríguez, 2004, 124-137).

In this scenario, very rich tools are available to tackle with the problem of providing flexibility in the creation of courses based in the aggregation of LOs. However, these authoring tools have not evolved in a parallel way to be instructional aware and still focus strongly on LT specifications and implement a LT specifications' syntax driven approach to implement ...