An Ontology Based Modeling Framework for Design of Educational Technologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ontology-based framework for systematically modeling instructional design knowledge to enable flexible customization of educational technologies, demonstrated through a large-scale literacy case study in India.

Contribution

It presents a novel ontology framework for modeling various aspects of instructional design, supporting flexible and scalable educational technology development.

Findings

Successfully modeled instructional goals, processes, and materials.

Applied framework to develop 1000 varied eLearning systems for Indian literacy.

Framework transferred to Indian government for large-scale deployment.

Abstract

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.