Authoring Tools for KOC — Concepts and Pedagogical Use

Abstract

One of the main problems of teachers aiming to teach the construction techniques used in to build a building is the lack of practical examples to show to their students. In order to be useful, these examples must come from real projects or even better the teachers may take their students to constructions sites, but this latter option is not always available and may be dangerous. To deal with this problem, Los Andes University has committed the construction of a knowledge repository containing information gathered from real projects and semantically described, in order to provide easy access to its content and in the language of people of construction. This project is called KOC, standing for Knowledge Objects of Construction, which uses an ontology to describe semantically the data contained in the repository. Being the pedagogical objective of the project, it is important to provide the teachers with additional tools to generate new knowledge objects, based on existing knowledge objects in the repository. This paper presents three composition tools for KOC: a complex objects composer issued from structured searches, a constructive processes composer and a case study composer, all of them aiming the improvement of learning quality in the technical area of building construction at the architecture and engineering schools. The paper also shows some examples of knowledge objects and how KOC is been used in the courses of the Architecture Department of Los Andes University.