A Framework for Ontology Instructional Design and Planning

Abstract

Although several standards have come out to defi ne a common convention for learning object metadata defi nition and representation, knowledge and components embedded in most existing e-learning systems are far from being sharable and reusable. This is mainly due to the lack of a general
framework for standard-based, ontology-aware courseware design and development. In this paper, we propose a new approach for developing ontology compliant learning objects. A set of ontology-based rules is applied for building ontology-aware learning material. The proposed e-learning environment is based on IEEE-LTSC LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard. In this paper, the LOM is extended with ontology related metadata that provides common vocabulary for domain knowledge representation and conceptual information about embedded content. Thus, the use of ontology provides a great potential for exchanging learning material, facilitating collaborative learning, and effi ciently retrieving context-based information from learning object repositories available on the web.