A Knowledge-Driven Web Tutoring System Framework for Adaptive and Assessment-Driven Open-Source Learning

Abstract

Cyberlearning is challenged by the lack of personal and assessment-driven learning, and students are often puzzled by the lack of instructor guidance and feedback; the huge volume and diversity of the learning materials; and the lack of the ability to zoom in from the general concepts to the more specific ones, or the opposite. Knowledge-driven tutoring systems are needed to improve the cyberlearning quality. One of the major difficulties is knowledge representation. The current industry standard uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) for representing knowledge structure as ontologies. But ontology only supports one “first-class” relation, “is-a”, between the concepts, and different knowledge areas usually need different custom relations to describe the relations among the concepts. For example, “part-of” and time dependency are important relations to represent most engineering knowledge bodies. OWL can only use object properties to emulate such custom relations, leading to awkward knowledge representation hard for instructors to code, validate and use domain knowledge.This research contributes an open-source knowledge-driven online tutoring system framework that is easy to be adapted for the teaching of any subject based on open-source learning objects. Pace University’s extension to OWL that supports Knowledge Graph (KG), a generalization of ontology, is used to support knowledge representation with custom relations. The instructors can use Pace University extended Protege IDE to visually declare custom relations and encode domain knowledge of a course in a single document. The instructor teaching experience is also coded in the KG to better support custom learning order by students with different backgrounds. Integrated assessment after each learning object leads to optimized and adaptive learning order and learning resource recommendation. Students can freely navigate the knowledge space from general to specific or the opposite, or follow unique custom relations. A web technology tutorial is used to validate the design and effectiveness of this tutoring system framework.