《Howard Beck》.pdfVIP

Fine-grained Representation of Educational Content based on Ontologies Howard Beck Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department College of Agriculture and Natural Resources University of Florida Gainesville, FL. 32611 - USA hwb@ 1. Introduction The process of creating effective educational materials that fully utilize electronic media can be greatly improved. The goal of using instructional technology is, of course, to provide students with better quality educational experiences. Among other things, this means that educational materials should be provided in a way that matches the individual student’s learning style, in a variety of selectable formats. At the same time, the cost to produce such materials must be significantly reduced if such an approach is to be widely used. For the most part, instructors are still struggling to prepare their course materials electronically. Conventional tools do not help this situation, and actually make the task more difficult by storing course materials in formats that are not flexible. New tools are needed to assist instructors in creating electronic course materials in a way which minimizes the development time to the instructor, while providing the best possible organization of course content and producing materials of high quality. In order to achieve these objectives, an architecture for course content management is proposed based on ontologies, description logics, and object databases. This