WorkingGroupProjects/2006/Didaskon

From Corrib Clan Wiki

Didaskon - Automated Curriculum Composition based on the Work-flow Scheduling of Semantically Annotated Learning Object Services

Goal:

Didaskon (didasko - gr. teach?) project will deliver a framework for composing an on-demand curriculum from existing learning objects provided by e-Learning services. The selection and work-flow scheduling of learning objects will be based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills/knowledge (pre-conditions), anticipated resulting skills/knowledge (goal) and technical details of the clients platform. Didaskon is part of Corrib.org and Working Group Projects started in 2006.

Description:

Current e-Learning systems deliver predefined courses tailored for a generic student on one of the generic levels of skills/knowledge wishing to upgrade to the next level. Learning services usually do not take into account user specific conditions, like e.g. wishing to broaden his/her knowledge in wide range of domains at the same time. This results in situation where student has to "attend" different courses at the same time, but since they are not aligned some of the information is repeated in some of them. On the other hand some potentially interesting and helpful (in the process of studying) information might not be cross-referenced between courses.

By introducing Semantic Web technologies to e-Learning services we can provide machine processable semantic description of:

• user's
  • knowledge level in different domains
  • goal/expectations from the course
  • technical availability specifications
  • previous evaluations
• learning objects
  • required/optional knowledge/skills/evaluations requirements
  • value added
  • cross-references with other services
  • pre/post-conditions
  • technical requirements specifications
• assessments
  • kind of evaluations/test/exams provided
  • users' evaluations on the learning
  • technical requirements specifications

By exposing existing learning objects and assessments services in the extensible P2P network the on-demand course scheduler will deliver curriculum services work-flow based on the semantic annotations on both users and learning objects. This curriculum will not only reflect user requirements and current state better, but will introduce new interdisciplinary, extensible and robust meaning of e-Learning. Based on the semantically annotated students profile and assessments system will allow more scalable helper features for students supervision.

Two key background research topics include:

• planning techniques (e.g. HTM Planning, AI Planning)
• composition and orchestration (e.g. research done by WSM* group in DERI Innsbruck)

... to be continued