Integrating the Learning Objectives and Syllabus into a Domain Ontology for Data structures Course

Abstract

The design of an assessment instrument (AI) is one of the major components of assessment process. The teachers have to generate AI aligned with the course learning objectives (LOs) within the boundary of topics defined by the syllabus of that course. When the instrument covers the LO fairly, it covers the subject matter defined by the syllabus fairly. This paper discusses an approach towards integrating both the contents and cognitive level defined in the LOs into the domain ontology for a Data structures course. This forms the first step towards building an automated system to measure the alignment of AI to course LOs. In the proposed approach, the notion of domain ontology is introduced on which the LOs are overlaid. Concepts and cognitive levels from LOs are extracted using Natural Language Processing. Mapping these to the nodes of the ontology also involves complex processes to take decisions about selection of nodes and traversal of links. For each of these, issues and challenges are discussed in detail and a solution is proposed. We have done a prototype implementation of the system to test our design. The effectiveness of this framework was tested by comparing the manually generated results by the experienced teachers to the system generated results and obtained an average accuracy of 90%. The examples are taken from Data Structures course of second year engineering curriculum.