Towards fuzzy domain ontology based concept map generation for E-learning

Abstract

With the wide spread applications of E-Learning technologies to education at all levels, increasing number of online educational resources and messages are generated from these E-Learning environments. Accordingly, instructors are often overwhelmed by the huge number of messages created by students through online discussion boards. It is quite difficult, if not totally impossible, for instructors to read through and analyze these messages to understand the progress of their students on the fly. As a result, adaptive classroom teaching is handicapped. The main contribution of this paper is the illustration of a novel concept map generation mechanism which is underpinned by a fuzzy domain ontology discovery algorithm. The proposed mechanism can automatically construct a concept map based on the messages posted to an online discussion board. Our initial experimental results reveal that the accuracy and the quality of the automatically generated concept maps are promising. Our research work opens the door to the development and application of intelligent software tools to enhance E-Learning. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.