Ontologies to integrate learning design and learning content

Abstract: The paper presents an ontology based approach to integrate learning designs and learning object content. The main goal is to increase the level of reusability of learning designs by enabling the use of a given learning design with different content. We first define a three-part conceptual model that introduces an intermediary level between learning design and learning objects called the learning object context. We then use ontologies to facilitate the representation of these concepts: LOCO is a new ontology for IMS-LD, ALOCoM is an existing ontology for learning objects, and LOCO-Cite is a new ontology for the contextual model. Building the LOCO ontology required correcting some inconsistencies in the present IMS LD Information Model. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach on three use cases: finding a teaching method based on domain-related competencies, searching for learning designs based on domain-independent competencies, and creating user recommendations for both learning objects and learning designs.