Despite rapid progress, most of the educational technologies today lack a strong instructional design knowledge basis leading to questionable quality of instruction. In addition, a major challenge is to customize these educational technologies for a wide range of instructional designs. Ontologies are one of the pertinent mechanisms to represent instructional design in the literature. However, existing approaches do not support modeling of flexible instructional designs. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an ontology based framework for systematic modeling of different aspects of instructional design knowledge based on domain patterns. As part of the framework, we present ontologies for modeling goals, instructional processes and instructional materials. We demonstrate the ontology framework by presenting instances of the ontology for the large scale case study of adult literacy in India (287 million learners spread across 22 Indian Languages), which requires creation of 1000 similar but varied eLearning Systems based on flexible instructional designs. The implemented framework is available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and is transferred to National Literacy Mission of Government of India. This framework could be used for modeling instructional design knowledge of systems for skills, school education and beyond.
John McCarthy has envisioned that an intelligent way of building systems should focus on the knowledge that is required to represent system's inputs and methods through which possible conclusions can be automatically derived from that knowledge (McCarthy, 1963). Newell has proposed the need to have a knowledge level focusing on specifying the world independent of symbol level that focuses on implementing the behaviour of the system (Newell, 1982).
“The Knowledge Principle: A system exhibits intelligent understanding and action at a high level of competence primarily because of the specific knowledge that it can bring to bear: the concepts, facts, representations, methods, models, metaphors, and heuristics about its domain of endeavor.” - Lenat and Feigenbaum (Lenat & Feigenbaum, 1991) Feigenbaum coined the term knowledge engineering and proposed knowledge base should be a fundamental basis that stores expertise of human experts in solving real-world problems (Lenat & Feigenbaum, 1991). There are two primary directions of research related to knowledge engineering one in the field of Artificial Intelligence primarily for automatic reasoning and expert systems and in computer science to represent different aspects of the system. In this paper, we are interested in modeling knowledge in the domain of education to facilitate design of educational technologies 1 and eLearning Systems 2 . We are specifically interested in the following questions:
-What is the knowledge that is required to facilitate the design of educational technologies for scale and variety? where scale is the number of systems to be developed and variety represents the different kinds of systems to be developed in education domain.
Towards answering these questions, the core contribution of this paper 3 is:
The rest of the paper is as follows: A brief background of adult literacy case study is presented in Section 2. Existing work on ontologies for instructional design and for adult literacy are discussed in Section 3 as part of related work. A broad spectrum of ontologies and their development process is in Section 4. In Section 5, we present our ontology based framework for modeling instructional design. Within this section, we detail ontologies for modeling goals, instructional process and instructional material in sub sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. We present a concrete instance of domain ontology for adult literacy as a instantiation of the ontology in Section 6.1. Finally, we end the paper with conclusions and future work in Section 7.
There are 287 million adult illiterates in India spread across 22 Indian Languages who can speak the language, but cannot read or write (Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2013/4: Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all, 2014). The National Literacy Mission of Government of India has come up with a uniform methodology called Improved Pace and Content of Learning (IPCL) to teach adult illiterates across India (Handbook for Developing IPCL Material, 2003). Based on this methodology, nearly 1000 primers4 are created and further customized for 22 Indian Languages. This presents the need to develop nearly 1000 eLearning Systems or iPrimers5 and further customize them for 22 Indian languages. We discussed this challenge of scale and variety in the context of adult literacy in India at length as part of first author’s doctoral thesis (Chimalakonda, 2017). Essentially, the goal of designing and customizing educational technologies presents the need to model knowledge pertaining to different aspects of instructional design so as to facilitate scale and variety. We rely on (i) IPCL, a pedagogy and a process for teaching 3Rs (Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic) to adult illiterates and which provides guidelines to prepare instructional materials across multiple languages and varied contexts (Handbook for Developing IPCL Material, 2003) (ii) field-tested eLearning systems based on this primers (iii) domain specific patterns of instructional design (Chimalakonda & Nori, 2014) (Chimalakonda, 2017). We are concerned with the following questions:
-What is the knowledge that is required to automate the development of eLearning systems for scale and variety in the context of adult literacy in India? -How can we represent this knowledge in order to customize these eLearning Systems for flexible instructional designs?
We briefly present a concrete example of knowledge from adult literacy case study as a first step for setting the context for rest of the paper. The IPCL approach suggests the use of eclectic method for teaching reading skills, comprehension, problem solving and facilitates learning through interpretation of contents in the context of life (Handbook for Developing IPCL Material, 2003)(Confintea VI: sixth international conference on adult education: final report, 2010). We consider “context of life” as learners’ prior knowledge. Ecletic method primarily differs from traditional methods as it does no
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