NEW TECHNOLOGIES APPLIED TO TEACHING ENGINEERING DESIGN: ONTOLOGIES APPLIED IN THE MOODLE PLATFORM

D. Cebrian-Tarrason, C. Muñoz, M. Royo, R. Vidal

GID, Engineering Design Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Construction, Universitat Jaume I, Av. Sos Baynat. s/n

E-12071, Castellón/Spain E-mail contact: dcebrian@uji.es

Abstract

In e-learning the knowledge contained in digital lectures and articles is generally used in platforms like Moodle and Blackboard. Among the various free open source software packages designed to create course management systems (CMSs), the most popular Moodle system owes its popularity not only to its technical characteristics, but to its flexible architecture. In the other part, ontologies have a range of potential benefits and applications in further and higher education, including the sharing of information across educational systems, providing frameworks for learning object reuse, and enabling intelligent and personalized student support. However, designing ontologies that could be shared for developing ontology-based learning environments is still a challenge. The overall aim of this paper was to provide a solution based in the Moodle Platform. The main idea behind the approach presented here is that an ontology can not only be useful as a learning instrument but it can also be employed to assess students’ skills. For it, each student is prompted to express his/her beliefs by building her/his own discipline-related ontology through an application displayed in the graphical user interface of Moodle system. Results of this work show the mistakenly understood parts of domain knowledge and help tutors improving distant courses. This paper demonstrates that this approach is much more efficient than usual tests, where some mistakes can be involved by ambiguous formulation of questions and misprints. In addition, in common tests correct answers can be obtained intuitively or by accident and do not reflect student’s actual knowledge about the topic under question. In conclusion, ontologies have a range of potential benefits and applications in further and higher education, including the sharing of information across educational systems, providing frameworks for learning object reuse, and enabling intelligent and personalized student support. In this paper, we applied this system to some subjects of engineering design. Keywords Ontologies, Moodle, E-learning. 1. INTRODUCTION In e-learning the knowledge contained in digital lectures and articles is generally used in platforms like Moodle and Blackboard. Among the various free open source software packages designed to create course management systems (CMSs), the most popular Moodle system owes its popularity not only to its technical characteristics, but to its flexible architecture. On-line learning (i.e., e-learning) offers new possibilities in learning. Thus, a student can get immediate feedback on solutions to problems; learning paths can be individualized, and so on. On-line learning is a growing business. Thus, the number of organizations working on online learning and the number of courses available on the Internet is growing rapidly. At present, a lot of e-learning tools with varying functionality and purposes exist [1-2]. E-learning is an alternative concept to the traditional tutoring system. The course tutor in a software tutoring system controls learners relatively weaker than he does in the traditional one, where the tutor is in charge of the contents and sequence of instructions. Therefore, in order to obtain better tutoring outcomes, a software tutoring system should emphasize engaging students in the learning process and be adaptive to each individual learner. The goal of the early software tutoring systems was to build user interfaces that provide efficient access to knowledge for the individual learners. Recent and emerging work focuses on the learner control over the learning process such as learner exploration, design and construction. For it, adaptive systems are used as tools [3]. With the application of more and better computer techniques in

Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain.

ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6005121

education and the involvement of more adults in software tutoring systems, the learner control strategy has become more appreciated than tutor or program control. Learning control needs the comparison between the learner’s knowledge base, which is modified as the learning process evolves, with the course domain knowledge base. It requires for powerful and interoperable tools of knowledge representation and analysis. A structured information representation is then required. For it, semantic domain information can be used as they provide for flexible and extendable properties to knowledge management systems. The motivation for developing reusable atomic learning components and to capture their characteristics in widely-accepted, formal metadata descriptions will most probably attract learning object providers to annotate their products with the accepted standards. An important component of e-learning is students’ skills and knowledge testing. One of the main problems for the creation of testing systems is interoperability, i.e. the opportunity to reuse these tests in different testing systems. To organize tests exchange between various systems, it is necessary to create some universal format of tests preservation and their processing instructions. An important requirement for this format is that it should be platform independent. Standardization of educational technologies and, in particular, formats of test data preservation is being worked out all over the world. With all, the most serious problems are caused by the semantic evaluation process. There is a great variety of Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). As far as evaluation is concerned, current platforms may be helpful to acquire tacit knowledge in organizations, but they do not solve the problematic of doing automatic semantic evaluations. Thus, cooperative cognitive processes are not efficient and the teaching staff must spend a lot of time correcting the tests. In fact, the time spent by teachers and moderators in E-learning courses is critical and costly in resources. Thus, the augment of students per teacher reduces the time each teacher can dedicate to each student. This makes the learning process to be impersonal, and not many teachers can keep track properly of their students’ progress. By bringing together the previous statements and the need for a good and fast continuous evaluation process in cooperative learning, we spot the need for tools supported by intelligent techniques. A possible solution might include different Semantic Web-based components to deal with this issue. Some authors [4,5] utilize ontology based semantics to improve the analyses of information in unstructured documents. The domain ontology plays a central role as a resource structuring the learning content [6]. One of the key challenges of the course construction process is to identify the information abstract domain within which this course will exist. The tutor has to describe the main terms and concepts from which a course is to be constructed. Aula Virtual is a system applied in Universitat Jaume I based in Moodle, core of the system of learning of our university. First we will explain what the reasons are of the application of E-learning, next we explain the principal bases of Moodle, specially the wikis, the part in which we could implement the ontology. As an example we will apply this concept to one subject of Engineering Design. 2. Methods E- learning The e-learning essence shows that some additional didactic principles should be further formulated for the case of e-learning [7]:

• Communication (openness of the communication forms and tools); • Interactivity (indirect personal interactions student-student, student-teacher); • Control (strict regulation and management of the activities using ICT); • Suitability (avoidance of unnecessary and pedagogically ungrounded use of ICT); • Flexibility (e.g. choice of time and place for learning); • Practical orientation of the content and the activities; • Case studies (the interaction during the learning process has dialogical and case oriented

nature due to virtual simulators and communication); • Problem-oriented nature of the content and dialogical nature of the interaction during the

learning process; • Principle of the supporting motivation; • Module-block principle in the educational programs and the learning activities

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Fig. 1: EcoWiki

In our scenario for supporting personalized e-Learning, the structure of knowledge and information plays a crucial role. The proposed ontology-based organisation helps the structure and the managing of content related to a given course or lesson. In particular, the framework for personalization base on aggregate usage profiles and the domain’s ontology. Moodle Moodle is an open source course (and content) management system in which activities are at the heart of the system. Moodle was designed on base of social constructivism. Constructionism asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience. The students could be considered as actively engaged in making meaning. Teaching with that approach looks for what students can analyse, investigate, collaborate, share, build and generate based on what they already know, rather than what facts, skills, and processes they can parrot. Moodle has modular design that makes it easy to create new courses, adding content that will engage learners. This modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment possess intuitive interface that makes it easy for teachers to create courses. Teachers and students require only basic early acquired from Internet browser skills to begin learning, which makes last one very simple and user-friendly platform [6]. Moodle in its application in the Universitat Jaume I, called "Aula Virtual", allow the use of new methods of E-learning and encourage the self-learning. This application allows the generation of a specific space in which students and teachers can interact in order to:

• Exchange experiences and the generation of debate forums about any topic of the subject. • Resolve problems and exercises along the course. • Allow an early evaluation of the teacher. • Self-evaluate their own works. • Set out new problems and obtain the collaboration of the community. • Access to activities of any subject in any moment in base to its availability.

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The student can also have some tools to assess its level of knowledge through quizzes, questionnaires or exercises. In order to encourage the collaborative work, the possibility of generating forums, wikis or workshops exists [8]. In this paper we are going to focus on wikis because it is in that part where we apply the concept of the ontology. Picture 1 shows an example of the application of a wiki in a Engineering Design subject. A Wiki is a collection of collaborative authored web pages. A wiki starts with one front page. Students can edit the page or add more pages to the wiki by creating links to new pages that don't yet exist [Manual of Using Moodle]. In Moodle, wikis can be a powerful tool for collaborative work. The entire class can edit a document together, or it is possible to create groups wikis which are only editable by group members. Other possibility is the generation of an user portfolio which allows the pursuit of the activity of the student by the teacher. On the other part, wikis don't allow a hierarchical distribution of the information because they are only related to tags. This type of organization is generally subjective and in the absence of more information, creates a misconception about the relation between the topics of one subject. Nowadays there are projects trying to solve this kind of problems as Semantic Wiki [9]. However, it hasn't been proved as a learning tool. The Semantic Web An ontology can be described as an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization, which can be taxonomically or axiomatically based [10]. Ontologies can be based around a single taxonomy or several taxonomies and their relationships [11]. Taxonomies consist of concepts and relationships that are organized hierarchically and whose concepts can be arranged as classes with subclasses [12, 13]. The structure of an ontology should be based on a taxonomy that allows for the modelling of a system based one certain functional descriptions [14]. In this way, the ontology can be considered as a knowledge base that is used further for extracting useful knowledge and producing personalized views of the e-Learning system. An ontology can formulate a representation of the learning domain by specifying all of its concepts, the possible relations between them and other properties, conditions or regulations of the domain. The development of the ontology is similar to the definition of a set of data and their structure. In this way, the ontology can be considered as a knowledge base that is used further for extracting useful knowledge and producing personalized views of the e-Learning system [15]. Current research on ontologies has shown the important role that they can play in the e-Learning domain. In [16] the authors outline how the Semantic Web technologies based on ontologies can be used for realizing sophisticated e-Learning scenarios and improve the management of their resources. In this case the ontologies are used for describing the semantics and defining the learning context of the material, as well as for structuring the courses. A framework for personalized e-Learning in the Semantic Web and the way the resource description formats can be utilized for automatic generation of hypertext structures from distributed metadata is proposed in [17]. In particular, several ontologies are used for describing the features of domains, users, and observations. An ontology-based tool suite, the Courseware Watchdog, which allows making the most of the e-Learning resources available on the Web, is presented in [18]. The tool addresses the different needs of tutors and learners and organizes their learning material according to them. An overview over the use of ontologies and metadata for e-Learning, as well as about innovative approaches and techniques is described in [19]. The authors give emphasis on relevant metadata standards, bindings, schemas and annotations or classifications for describing content/topic of a resource. Then they introduce different ontologies and present a RDF-based peer-to-peer network for digital resources and for the exchange of learning objects and services. Ontology Model We use ontologies to model knowledge about the learner (user context), knowledge about the content, and the domain knowledge (the taxonomy of the domain being learned). By allowing learners or contents to share a common understanding of knowledge structure, the ontologies enable applications to interpret learner context and content features based on their semantics. Furthermore, ontologies’ hierarchical structure lets developers reuse domain ontologies (e.g., of computer science, mathematics, etc.) in describing learning fields and build a practical model without starting from scratch [20].

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We adopt OWL (Web Ontology Language) [21] to express ontology enabling expressive knowledge description and data interoperability of knowledge. It basically includes ontology class definition and ontology instance markups. 3. ONTOMOODLE OntoMoodle, a system based in an ontology using the CMS's Moodle, can bring to the user/teacher in one hand the possibility of having all the information organized. This fact is one of the characteristics of an ontology. Here, ontologies are comprised of concepts, attributes, relations, values and instances. The concepts are hierarchically organized through the taxonomic relation, although any other relation can be made explicit among two concepts. Moreover, the ontological knowledge is represented in OWL, which provides the modelling primitives needed. On the other hand, the information obtained from the ontology can be used to assess in the improvement of the skills of the student. Their aim is that they only have to think in the kind of contents they are using. In order to reach this objective, the ontology obtains information from the output of Moodle. That creates a system where the information of the wiki is linked to an ontology that runs under the system. The aim of that structure is that the student doesn't have to know how to create an ontology. This information is rescued from the database of the information of the user. The student when is creating the wiki, is being asked for the relations with other contents of the course. This information would be compiled by the database. Each student could interact with the wiki of the others, always this effort will be rewarded in the final score of the activity. The technologies related to this tool would be a web service in order to explain the solution for this experience. The ontology is created by the students when represents the relations of the contents. Therefore, the teacher with a low level of knowledge about ontologies can also learn to use this tool because all the information collected in the system comes from the database. The teacher has to be worried only about the know-how of the system. The database of the wiki compiles information of different aspects in order to assess the interactivity of the student with the wiki:

• Variety of topics that the student is creating in his own wiki and in others, • Modifications of the wikis created by other students, • Visits received by other students, • Wikis created that come from the own wiki.

With that information OntoMoodle could help to the teacher organizing all the knowledge about a student in taxonomy, a hierarchical organisation of its personal information, and allowing knowing in which activities is making better efforts. That information would bring to the teacher which abilities are better in the student depending on which topics in the wiki is using. In order to ease the score of the activity, all the documents in the wiki will also have a score based in 5 points that the different students and the teachers could mark and with the part of comments, they could express their opinions. To sum up we distort the initial use of a wiki, as a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. The aim is the possibility of linking the tags and information that is brought to one system in an automatic system. In the next part, we propose the application of OntoMoodle to some subjects of engineering design. 4. RESULTS In the case of the subject about engineering design, in this paper we are going to consider a case based on a subject of Product and Environment in order to show the different characteristics that appear in the use of OntoMoodle. In the cited subject, which is described in the other paper [22], is shown some difficulties that appear to apply to take the most of all the different modules that exists in Moodle. In the subject applied, we are working with a eco-wiki (Fig. 1) with content is related to the importance of the environment in the design of products.

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Fig.2. OntoMoodle applied to Eco-wiki

In this paper, we present an ontology (Fig. 2) which obtains the information from the eco-wiki. With that information in a reasoned is possible to infer which student has collaborated more in the wiki, has been more referenced and has introduced more content. With the OntoMoodle we can consider what the uses of the information are, also the information that a student attaches to the system. The most important is that other students could choose what the more priority information is. In other words, the statistic of how many students have visited or changed some information is also relevant. Comparing that information with the results of the subject is possible to know that the students with more participation in the wiki, have better results in the marks of the exam. On the other hand, the teacher would get a better control and knowledge and easier about all the students. 5. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, OntoMoodle presents a different way of using wikis in Moodle based in the development of an ontology. A similar approach can be found in that paper [23], a system to evaluate students’ exams by using semantic web technologies had been presented. With OntoMoodle is possible to generate a general knowledge for the tutoring of a student in order to condense new knowledge through the academic cycle. In base to the marks obtained in the development of the subjects, the student could complete a tree of acquired knowledge. For that, it is necessary the accumulation of all the information of the student in a system that manages and actualizes all that information. In that case, we would be considering the possibility that the ontology would be brought into a virtual tutor. In that way, it would be possible to know the evolution in his progress. This fact would be really important to know which skills have developed more along the degree. However, one unresolved question is the speed in the information processing because ontologies need a lot of resources of the system to work correctly. Moreover, this system could be based in others programming languages that could be quicker but that would depend on people with a better knowledge in computer science to be developed.

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In the future, OntoMoodle could be improved using the Flex technology, where the teacher could have the possibility of having a frame that shows how the ontology that is being created is.

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