Modeling instructional-design theories with ontologies: Using methods to check, generate and search learning designs

摘要

Instructional theories have been defined as practice-oriented theories offering explicit guidance on how to help people learn that offer situation-specific methods. The descriptions of many instructional theories include recommendations or rules that can be subject to modeling in formal knowledge representation languages. Further, recent work in the application of ontologies to learning technology has made openly available formal representation schemas for activity sequences and learning resource descriptions, based on evolving standards. Combining these with the representation of instructional-design theories provides a framework for developing rule-based, instructional theory-aware support tools for different practical purposes. These purposes include (partially) checking the compatibility of learning designs with instructional theories in authoring tools, using methods as query criteria in learning resource repositories, and the generation of tentative learning activities for some given instructional design methods. This paper addresses the main epistemological issues and the representation of the main elements of instructional models using the formal ontology language OWL, which can be used in conjunction with the SWRL rule language for the purposes described. Following existing conceptualizations, methods and conditions are modeled in a generic way able of capturing a plurality of views.