Ontology-Based Design of Educational Trajectories

Abstract

Despite many benefits, the Web-based education is surrounded by such challenges as the gaps in students’ knowledge and incapacity to choose an appropriate course and lesson sequence that often result in learners’ frustration and stress as well as teachers’ overload and dissatisfaction. This research includes an ontological analysis demonstrated that contents of different disciplines are poorly intercommunicated and the interdisciplinary links are often disregarded whereas the inflexible curriculum structure is unsuitable for changes. The paper describes the design of individual student’s educational trajectories based on an educational thesaurus. The offered method supports the overall set of concepts in the learner’s knowledge domain providing a suitable arrangement of study for different groups of learners. An application example joins three disciplines across their conceptual basis, thus confirming the effectiveness of the proposed approach.