On the general structure of ontologies of instructional models

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On the general structure of ontologies of
instructional models

• Miguel-Angel Sicilia
• Information Engineering Research Unit University
  of Alcalá

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Motivation

• The status of pedagogical metadata
• IEEE LOM InteractivityType/level, etc.
• IMS LD Represents the structure, not the
  pedagogical rationale behind
• Some classifications exist, e.g. Conole.
• What about intructional design?
• ID techniques constraint the universe of possible
  LD (combinations of resources/activities)

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Instructional models

• Instructional models
• practice-oriented theories offering explicit
  guidance on how to help people learn that offer
  situation-specific methods, that in turn are
  described in terms of components, and that are
  know to be effective for learning under some
  conditions (to some extent).
• Methods can be made operational
• Result
• Learning resources, e.g. an IMS LD.

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Not talking of Process models

• E.g. ADDIE

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Design constraints

• A concrete learning design LD expressed in a
  digital educational description language is
  provisionally conformant to the IDModel A if
  there exist a legal interpretation LI of A in
  terms of the description language and LD fulfills
  all the constraints contained in LI.

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Ontologies and rules

• TheoryOne
• give abundant examples of the concepts treated
• We assume a IMS LD ontology in OWL.

lrLearningObject(?lo) ? lrhasPart(?lo, ?lo2)
? lrhasPart(?lo, ?lo3) ? lrExerciseLO(?lo2) ?
lrExerciseLO(?lo3) ? hasAbundantExamples(?lo
, true) lrLearningObject(?lo1) ?
lrhasPart(?lo1, ?lo2) ? lrhasPart(?lo2, ?lo3)
? lrhasPart(?lo1, ?lo3)
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Requirements

• State the objectives.
• State the kinds of learning resources.
• State sequences and relations between them.
• these can be found in IEEE LOM to some extent.
• Use your favorite DLrules language.

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Usage

• Practical application
• Search give me LD that complies with inst.
  theory X.

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Elaboration theory

• Teach broader, more inclusive concepts before
  narrower, more detailed concepts that elaborate
  upon them

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Conclusions

• (some)Intructional methods can be (partially)
  made operational in term of learning resources.
• Some are still too abstract (this can be a
  criteria for validness)
• (different) sets of rules can be used to check
  them as an aid in the instructional design
  process.
• This is largely unexplored.
• This has practical applications to design tools
  and for search!.