A Competency-Based Ontology for Learning Design Repositories

Abstract

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 domain-specific 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.