An Instructional Design Methodology for Building Distance Learning Courses

Abstract

The importance of a distance learning program heavily depends on the type and quality of the provided digital content. The Hellenic Open University (HOU) offers distance learning courses and therefore the volume of the provided digital learning content is significantly large. This fact establishes essential the need for an efficient and effective mechanism for searching, managing and retrieving the educational content. A modern approach for the organization of the digital learning material is the Learning Objects (LOs) paradigm, the use of which is adopted by many e-learning systems and applications nowadays. In this work we try to take advantage of all of the good characteristics of LOs and propose an instructional design methodology that builds courses based on these particular chunks of educational material. The aim of the proposed methodology is exactly to provide guidelines for the design and creation of courses based on LOs. Secondly, it intends to exploit semantic technologies in order to capture and represent the knowledge that is produced during each step. This semantically enriched information, regarding a course, is could be ideally utilized during the creation of LOs.

Combining Agents and Ontologies for Building an Intelligent Tutoring System

“…It is worth noting here that the process for the cognitive domain representation from which we construct the corresponding learning objects and also the definition of the learning outcomes for the different cognitive domains is realized within a welldefined and applied collaborative methodology between domain experts (tutors) and knowledge engineers, described in (Panagiotopoulos et al, 2012, Nikolopoulos et al, 2013.…”