Deployment of ontologies for an effective design of collaborative learning scenarios

Abstract

Two of the most important research subjects during the development of intelligent authoring systems (IAS) for education are the modeling of knowledge and the extraction of knowledge flows from theory to practice. It bridges the gap between theoretical understanding about learning and the practical foundations of design the knowledge of intelligent systems that support the learning process. Developing an IAS for collaborative learning is especially challenging in view of knowledge representation because it is based on various learning theories and given the context of group learning where the synergy among the learner's interactions affect the learning processes and hence, the learning outcome. The main objective of this work is to introduce an ontological infrastructure on which we can build a model that describes learning theories and to show how we can use it to develop programs that provide intelligent guidance to support group activities based on well-grounded theoretical knowledge. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.