Constraint modeling for curriculum planning and validation

Abstract

Curricula authoring is a complex process, involving different actors and different kinds of knowledge. Learners aim at acquiring expertise about some topic of their own interest, and need to perceive that the curriculum they attend will lead them towards their goal; when this does not happen, they become demotivated. Learners are all different, not only in their aims but also in their background knowledge and skills; curricula must carefully be tailored to the learner's individual traits: when this does not happen, curricula are not effective from a pedagogical perspective. On the other hand, it is not possible to leave learners alone in the design of a curriculum because this activity involves both knowledge about the topics to teach, and knowledge about teaching itself. It is one of the tasks of the school to support curricula authoring so to guarantee the correctness of the result w.r.t. the teaching goals and to pedagogical strategies. In this article we face the problem of authoring personalized curricula and propose a modular, layered architecture that accounts for the representation of learning resources, of the domain model, of the learner, and of pedagogical constraints, with the aim of supporting different validation tasks. The representation combines a Semantic Web approach to annotation with a declarative representation in linear temporal logic. The validation layer of the proposed architecture includes different kinds of inter-conceptual, postconstruction verifications, all of which can be realized by means of model checking techniques. The article also reports about a prototype implementation based on the Personal Reader for education, a framework that supplies to its users personalization functionalities implemented in a service-oriented fashion.

Enhancing workplace competence acquisition through a persuasive system

“…Moreover, in this paper we focus specifically on the concept of atomic competence (Baldoni et al 2011 ). Atomic competences (also known as micro competences) can be understood as the smallest element of a competence (Pedraza-Jimenez et al 2004 ; Valverde-Albacete et al 2003 ).…”

Interlinking educational resources and the web of data

“…These issues apply as well to the idea of “Smart Spaces” (Simon et al , 2004) for learning. The work in Baldoni et al (2006) follows the idea of using a dedicated personalization web service that makes use of semantic learning object descriptions to identify and provide appropriate learning content. Neither is the integration of several distributed learning services within the scope of this research, nor is the allocation of services at runtime.…”

Engineering commitment-based business protocols with the 2CL methodology

“…This abstract representation is an expression of the no-flow-in-flow motto, introduced in [6]. The representation is inspired by ConDec [40] and by DCML [1] and it follows the graphical convention, which is reported in Figure 3. Each operator is represented with a different symbol, where: (i) the direction of the arrow (if present) denotes the temporal nature of the constraint, expressing a relative order on the achievement of two conditions.…”

“…Dashed lines highlight relationships between events/facts and commitments. violation 1 . Nodes and arcs are colored in ways that show whether the corresponding actions and states fulfill the requirements of the sale protocol, enriched by the MiFID Directive.…”