Learning Path Description for Education using a Domain Ontology

Abstract

Education is an important part of everyone’s life. Indeed, no one can escape it, and everyone chooses the knowledge and skills they wish to acquire. This training involves a learning process, which can be represented by modeling a learning path. However, the connection between a learning object, which is the smallest unit in this modeling, and the topic it relates to is not clearly determined. For this reason, this thesis focuses on specifying the content of a course using a metamodel defined for a learning path and integrating a domain ontology. As the issue is closely linked to its environment, a pragmatic philosophy and design science research are used, along with data collection methods such as semi-structured interviews and analysis of existing course descriptions. The results show that the use of semantic lifting makes it possible to link a learning path model to a domain ontology, on condition that the metamodels are aligned. This approach is validated by a practical example and confirmation from end-users. Using these new models, it becomes possible to apply ontology-based reasoning when designing the learning path of a course, facilitating the detailed description of its content.