Applying common sense to distance learning

Abstract

One of the challenges of Distance Learning (DL) over the Web is that it imposes physical distance between teachers and students, and thus reduces opportunities for teachers to fully understand the state of student knowledge and adapt instructional material to their needs. While the knowledge to be taught is usually well expressed in the curriculum material, the knowledge of a typical student is harder to codify. In this paper, it is shown how a large knowledge base of common sense statements can be used to help model student knowledge and consequently to help teachers plan learning actions by • Identifying topics that need coverage by the curriculum;• Identifying what a student is already likely to know;• Locating possible misconceptions that need to be corrected; and• Assuring that the student understands the vocabulary needed to express relevant subject material.

Learning activities on health care supported by common sense knowledge

“…Recent researches show that common sense knowledge can be used to accomplished pedagogical issues during the learning activities' planning by [8], [9], [3], [4]:…”