C3PO – A Domain-Aware Course Authoring Tool

Marco RonchettiDept. Informatica e Telecommuniciazioni

Universita di Trento, Italy

Joseph SantComputing and Engineering Sciences,

Sheridan College, Canada

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Outline

Domain Ontologies – Benefits and Challenges

C3PO Motivation Strategic Overview UI Features Ontology-aided Searching Current Status

Summary

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Domain Ontologies and EducationAdvantages

Provides common discipline-specific language for description of courses.

Enables automated assessment of coverage of model curriculum.

Enables automated comparison of courses. Enables inference of learning object metadata

from a pool of course specifications.

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Domain Ontologies and Education Challenges

Pre-defined taxonomies might not be expressive enough.

Workload and complexity issues.

Ontology Mapping

Domain OntologyACM CS Curriculum 2001

950 topics 132 units 14 Areas

Actual CurriculumAmerican University Curriculum~400-1800 topics 40 Courses

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C3PO – Motivation

Problem:Mapping curricula to standardized domain ontologies too difficult after the fact.

Proposed Solution:Incorporate use of standardized domain ontologies in an easy-to-use course authoring tool.

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How?

Must be easy to use: Same drag and drop usage model for learning

objects, web links, and domain ontology items (topics and learning objectives).

Must provide compelling benefits: Course web-site publishing. Ontology-aided (contextual) search of learning

object repositories and the web.

Must adapt to current practice in authoring. Accesses instructor’s local store of materials as well

as remote objects.

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C3PO - Overview

User InterfaceModule

Search PluginInterface

Course CompositerEngine

PublishModule

(HTML,RDF)

DomainSchema Engine

LocalFile

LOR +WWW

SearchPlugin

LocalFile

DomainServer

LOR LORLocalFile

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C3PO – Screenshot

Domain ModelPane

CourseWindow

Local FilesTab

ObjectSearchTab

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C3PO – The Properties Tab Element Annotation

EnteringUnitInformation

C3PO – Storage and Publishing

Publication of multi-pageCourse web site from courseSpecification using (XSLT) stylesheets. Customizable by Users.

Saving of Course SpecificationIn XML format.

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Special Features:Ontology-Aided Search

Search FacilityWithGroupingSupport

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AdaptiveSearchPlug-in

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Inferring Learning Object Metadata From Unit Domain Info

C1

U1U2

T101 T461 LO1 LO3

C2

U1U2

T101 LO3 LO8 LO9

C3

U1U2

T101 T461 LO3 LO5

C4

U1U2

T461 L01 LO4 LO6

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Status

Loading, saving of a course specification.

Loading of a single standard domain format (ACM-2001 CS curriculum).

Drag and Drop of Local files, learning objectives, topics to a course spec.

Test of search plug-in and hierarchical display using Google search.

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Status

Publication of simple multi-page course websites from course spec using XSLT.

Make plug-in interface more flexible (for access to LOR’s).

Drag and drop of search results. Support for remote storage and retrieval

of domains, specification files and course websites.

Robustness and usability improvements

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Summary

Many advantages to association of curriculum elements with standardized domain ontology items.

Prohibitively time-intensive to produce these associations after the fact.

Incorporate these associations during the course authoring process

C3PO Goal: End-to-end production of traditional course

representations to include domain references. Use drag and drop approach for both learning objects and

domain objects. Produces course website Implements a domain-aware adaptive search with

hierarchical display.