Instructional Material Development using Ontology Learning

Abstract

In a university setting, lecturers are instructional designers responsible todesign and develop instructional materials to be used in class. Textbooksand presentation slides are among the sources used in the delivery ofknowledge. However, in order to facilitate different students’ learning styles,alternatives for textbooks must be considered, allowing the course contentto be organised in smaller chunks. This paper describes the developmentontology process using ontology learning technique. Ontology is a set ofknowledge which contains objects, concepts, entities, and the relationshipsamong them in a particular domain. In this study, the course chosen toanalyse the development of ontology is Fundamentals of Computer Science(CSC401). This is an introductory course taken by students during semesterone in the Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences. Textbook is thesource used in developing this ontology. The technique chosen in this studyis a semi-automatic ontology development that can accelerate the processof producing a new ontology, while the development phases involved arethe ‘extraction of important concepts’ and ‘representation of ontology’.The result shows that an ontology can be represented in the form of visualgraph such as mind map. This matches the learning preference of visuallearners and enrich their learning experiences.