Teaching-Material Design Center: An ontology-based system for customizing reusable e-materials

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.09.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Use of electronic teaching materials (e-material) to support teaching is a trend. e-Material design is therefore an important issue. Currently, most e-material providers offer a package of solutions for different purposes. However, not all teachers and learners need everything from a single package. A preferable alternative is to find useful material from different packages and combine them for a particular course. Currently, most educators collect the material manually, which is time-consuming and may result in missed material. In this paper, we describe a system – the Teaching-Material Design Center, which follows the standard of Sharable Content Object Reference Model – to separate e-material for use as teaching templates and learning objects and to label the material with use of semantic metadata for searching. This system can find existing teaching templates and learning objects for e-material designers and provide a convenient environment for constructing customized e-material for different requirements. We describe the implementation and evaluation of the proposed system for a course. Our system is efficient in finding teaching templates and learning objects and shortening the e-material development process.

Introduction

With the flourishing development of the Internet, mass communication, and multimedia, different options exist for education materials. Computer-based teaching activities attract a lot of attention because learners can learn at any time and any place alone. Through the Learning Management System (LMS), students can use e-material to learn a topic according to their own needs.

Because of the prevalence of e-learning and the requirements of courseware, educational resources from different providers become more diverse. The development of courseware is being influenced by the development of information technology. Third-generation teaching material in LMS, applied in most current systems, is hypermedia courseware (Aroyo, Dicheva, & Cristea, 2002). The novelty is the lack of constraints on viewing the material in a certain order. These days, the content of teaching material is no longer limited to local access. e-Material can be obtained from different Web sites and authors, which changes the activity of courseware authoring. These changes can benefit both producers and consumers. One of the major benefits is avoiding repeatedly designing similar materials (Bohl, Schellhase, Sengler, & Winand, 2002). Thus, can select portions of e-materials from different providers and assemble them, which can provide more abundant teaching content for learners.

This selectivity feature sounds attractive. However, under the current conditions, this feature is not easily achieved. First, there is no unified standard to describe e-material. Many organizations have proposed metadata to describe digital learning resources to deal with inconsistent formats. Among them is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), defined by the US Department of National Defense (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2001). SCORM allows for a standardized flow to find, retrieve and reuse useful resources (Silva, Lucena, & Fuks, 2001). Besides the standardization issue, course sequencing has become another important research issue (Fischer, 2001). A noteworthy question is how to provide an environment for finding and integrating suitable e-material (Paulsson & Naeve, 2003).

Our proposal for reusing e-material from different providers and integrating them for a particular course involves dividing e-material into teaching templates and learning objects. We provide a suggested workflow for reusing the material and designing a “packet”. Semantic metadata, following the SCORM Content Aggregation Model, had also been used to describe e-material. Two ontologies, course ontology and content ontology, are designed to support retrieval. Our system, the Teaching-Material Design Center (TMDC), not only supports teaching template reuse and design but also integrates and sequences learning objects. We discuss the implementation and evaluation of TMDC for a proposed course. Our system can help the courseware author search for design and adapt e-material using a recommended workflow.

Section snippets

Learning objects

Teaching materials are developed according to the needs of teaching. Currently, many studies on authoring teaching material focus on designing learning objects. In this paper, we use the term “learning object” for lack of unanimous definition (Paulsson and Naeve, 2003, Spalter and Dam, 2003). A learning object in the educational field is considered as any kind of material that can be reused in teaching, such as a lesson plan, video, or section of a program code (Spalter & Dam, 2003), or it can

The architecture of TMDC

In designing TMDC, we adopt the concepts of learning content (Fischer, 2001), integration of Agent-based Information Management System (AIMS) authoring architecture (Aroyo et al., 2002), and the process model of course authoring architecture (Klein, Ateyeh, Konig-Ries, & Mulle, 2003) to achieve the goal of reusing teaching template and learning objects. The architecture of TMDC contains four modules (shown in Fig. 1): teaching material repository, ontology, course database, and course authoring.

Methodology

We evaluated TMDC from a functionality and usability perspective. Evaluating the system involves completion of the following tasks: (1) ontology designers set up the ontology model, by Protégé 2000; (2) system designers implement a TMDC prototype system for evaluation; (3) participants use the TMDC to design a course; and (4) analysts assess the experimental results.

Participants

We invited 30 postgraduate students who had been section tutors of the “Network Management” course. They had participated in

Experiment 1

Time to develop a new course by use of TMDC and a traditional method. The effects of the procedure of course authoring is also verified.

Table 3 shows the time spent to develop a new course with use of the TMDC and a traditional system. Almost half of the participants (43.33%) spent 15–20 min generating their teaching material with use of TMDC. TMDC required a substantially shorter time for course development than the traditional system. Table 4 shows the degree of acceptance of TMDC. Most

Conclusion

e-Learning is a trend in education. Learners can benefit because the technology has no restriction in time and distance. However, building an e-learning environment means not only building a system but also generating high-quality teaching materials. Different teachers may not need the content of a whole package of e-material from a single author. Many prefer to design teaching material by combining several learning objects. Authors spend a lot of time designing similar teaching materials

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