An ontology engineering approach to the realization of theory-driven group formation

Abstract

Abstract. One of the main difficulties during the design of collaborative learning activities is adequate group formation. In any type of collaboration, group formation plays a critical role in the learners' acceptance of group activities, as well as the success of the collaborative learning process. Nevertheless, to propose both an effective and pedagogically sound group formation is a complex issue due to multiple factors that influence group arrangement. The current (and previous) learner's knowledge and skills, the roles and strategies used by learners to interact among themselves, and the teacher's preferences are some examples of factors to be considered while forming groups. To identify which factors are essential (or desired) in effective group formation, a well structured and formalized representation of collaborative learning processes, supported by a strong pedagogical basis, is desirable. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to present an ontology that works as a framework based on learning theories that facilitates group formation and collaborative learning design. The ontology provides the necessary formalization to represent collaborative learning and its processes, while learning theories provide support in making pedagogical decisions such as gathering learners in groups and planning the scenario where the collaboration will take place. Although the use of learning theories to support collaborative learning is open for criticism, we identify that they provide important information which can be useful in allowing for more effective learning. To validate the usefulness and effectiveness of this approach, we use this ontology to form and run group activities carried out by four instructors and twenty participants. The experiment was utilized as a proof-of-concepts and the results suggest that our ontological framework facilitates the effective design of group activities, and can positively affect the performance of individuals during group learning.

Using Ontological Engineering to Overcome AI-ED Problems: Contribution, Impact and Perspectives

“…Seiji Isotani and Mizoguchi built an ontology of learning theories for group formation by interpreting some theories from the view point of group formation (Isotani et al 2009(Isotani et al , 2010. At that time, group formation was mainly done in ad-hoc ways.…”

Mapeamento Sistemático na Literatura Acadêmico-Científica sobre Abordagens para Formação de Grupos em E-Learning

“…Outras contribuições dos trabalhos primários (7%) têm foco na implementação de sistemas baseados em Web [25,38] para formar grupos efetivos, utilizando, por exemplo, interface de usuário para configuração dos agrupamentos. Há ainda trabalhos que apresentam abordagens baseadas em ontologias (3%) [29] e outros (3%) que focam suas pesquisas em metodologias de avaliação da formação de grupos [36]. A Figura 4 ilustra as abordagens encontradas.…”

“…De forma geral, eles propõem grupos homogêneos e/ou heterogêneos em relação a determinadas características. Verificou-se que 45% dos trabalhos propõem tipos de grupos como heterogêneos em relação aos dados do perfil do aluno, tais como a turma, a região em que se encontra, o gênero, o tipo de personalidade ou o nível de habilidade, como por exemplo a habilidade com programação [33,21,36,34,41,43,35,28,16,22,24,29,37]. Em seguida, tem-se 28% que considera o tipo de grupo heterogêneo e homogêneo por desempenho em atividade de colaboração, obtido pelo nível de interação entre os estudantes [25,38,42,23,19,40,30,27].…”

CSCL in Asia

“…These are not our first Asian papers. In fact, we started in the very first issue of ijCSCL with an article from Hong Kong (Lee et al 2006) and have published papers from the Asia-Pacific region every year (Baghaei et al 2007;Hung et al 2008;Isotani et al 2009;Kapur and Kinzer 2009;Lu et al 2010;Oshima et al 2006;Reimann 2009;Rourke and Kanuka 2007;Tee and Karney 2010;van Aalst 2009). IjCSCL is an international journal and aims to publish a high-quality selection of world-class CSCL research from wherever groundbreaking work is taking place.…”