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Constructing a Learner Centric Semantic Syllabus for Automatic Text Book Generation
- 1. Constructing a Learner Centric Semantic Syllabus for Automatic Text Book Generation Guide: Dr. Kannan Moudgalya Course Cordinator: Dr. Sahana Murthy Aliabbas Petiwala 114380003 Education Technology Dept, Semester I ETS 801
- 2. Purpose of Syllabus (Jay Parkes 2002)
- 3. Three Features of a Learner-Centered Syllabi Create a collaborative active learning environment . (R. M. Palloff 1999.) (P. Dillenbourg 1996) (M. Warschauer 1997)
- 5. A Good Syllabus… (Jay Parkes 2002) Important Elements Miscellaneous Elements – Course Title – Course Description – Course Prerequisites – Topics Covered – Knowledge Units – Learning Objectives – Reading List • Books • Book Chapters • Articles and Papers • Other Scholarly Publications – Classroom Material • Presentation Slides • Instructor’s Notes • Assignments – Information about: • Instructors • Teaching Assistants – Course Calendar
- 14. An Example (S. Gunnarsson) Syllabus Topics
- 17. Proposed Methodology : Active Learner Community
- 18. Proposed OWL Ontology for syllabus UML Representation of semantic syllabus OWL ontology
- 19. Object properties and Instances of Units and Topics covered
- 20. Easier data integration helps in Collaborative Learning Benefits of Using OWL for representing the syllabus
Editor's Notes
- 1. Creating a Community State office hours and times and methods of availability of the instructor. Is the instructor available via phone or e-mail? The accessibility of the instructor demonstrates the willingness of the instructor to provide extra time and energy in providing students assistance. This ease of accessibility creates a feeling of community for the student. Create a personal connection with the student. Write a letter to the student in the syllabus. You may want to ask students to respond to your letter by asking you two questions concerning the information in your letter. You may ask the student to evaluate the course to aid in improvement. Set a tone of caring and concern on the part of the instructor. Describe collaborative work and active learning activities. Instructors who engage students in collaborative and active learning activities demonstrate respect for the students with lessons that encourage higher levels of thinking by the students. Collaborative activities allow students to learn from each other resulting in a learning community. What do I want students to know about myself? My interest in the discipline? My teaching philosophy? How can I convey my enthusiasm for teaching, for the course? 2. Providing Students with Power and Control Empowering students is motivating students to accept their own responsibility in the learning process. Wording in the syllabus is a key to providing students a choice with regard to the acceptance of their learning responsibility. Providing students with a choice, even a minor choice provides the student with a sense of control (M. Harris/R. Cullen, 2009) 3. Evaluation and Assessment Assessment is ongoing formative feedback, allowing students to determine progress in the learning of the curriculum. Assessment also provides feedback of the students’ level of learning to the instructor. Assessment is ungraded. Evaluation determines if learning out comes are appropriate and valid. Evaluation is used as summative information. Evaluation is graded.
- Syllabus from many Indian universities for technical courses was reviewed by us and we found that most of the time instructors fail to communicate the course content unambiguously to the students and don’t adhere to a well-defined syllabus structure as delineated above We see that this observation in Taiwan also holds true in similar developing economies like India. The reason for such an attitude towards syllabus can stem from the lax approach used by traditional teaching and learning for undergraduate level courses in developing countries. Y. T. Tung, “A Case Study of Undergraduate Course Syllabi in Taiwan,” University of North Texas, 2010.
- According to Vygotsky , students are capable of performing at higher intellectual levels when asked to work in collaborative situations than when asked to work individually[11]. Thus in a learner centric syllabus the content and the teacher adapt to the students feedback and suggestions rather than expecting the students to adapt to the content. The major theme of Vygotsky's theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."
- A semantic learner centric syllabus facilitates the collaborative learning process by allowing the machine to understand the semantics (meanings) of the syllabus which can be used by intelligent agents and book authoring tools to mine relevant information from the web
- For designing undergraduate engineering courses a new engineering education model named CDIO[23] is proposed by four leading universities of the world which includes MIT. The CDIO Syllabus is a taxonomy that represents a long list of desired knowledge and skills required by graduating engineers. The CDIO syllabus document makes the following statement: “Graduating engineers should be able to Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate complex value-added engineering systems in a modern team-based environment”[24]. Thus the CDIO taxonomy assists the syllabus maker in designing a CDIO inspired syllabus.
- An ITU matrix is proposed by [25] can be used to classify subject topics into three categories, namely the category of (I:Introduce) if the topic is of introductory nature and requires no assessment, , (T:Teach) for topics that need to be taught systematically and assessed and finally U:Utilized for prerequisite topics that are assumed to be known by students.An example of an ITU matrix is given by [26] delineating the how the subject topics in a syllabus can be classified as Introduce(I) , Teach (T) and Utilized(U) corresponding to the CDIO taxonomy levels 1,1.1,1.2 … is shown in Table 1
- Using a semantic web language like OWL to represent the syllabus document will make the syllabus machine understandable allowing semantic web applications in the LOD to query from such documents as well as allow a textbook generation tool to efficiently assemble educational resources form the semantic web. It will also allow the learning community of students as well as subject matter experts (SMEs) to take part in the course construction process and add useful resources to the course repository. Fig. 6 shows a typical scenario of using a semantic syllabus. Each syllabus ontology is represented by a cloud. The small circles represent subject topics of interests to the user or subject matter experts in its respective ontology cloud. The users A,BC …F each have their own ontology reflecting their knowledge model of the course syllabus. The instructor sitting at the center has his own knowledge model for the syllabus in terms of topics. The owl:sameAs construct can be used to specify equality between individual topics This built-in OWL property owl:sameAs links an individual to an individual. Such an owl:sameAs statement indicates that two URI references actually refer to the same thing: the individuals have the same "identity". This itself results in a linked ontology. The owl:sameAs statements thus defines mappings between different syllabus ontologies. It is unrealistic to assume everybody will use the same name to refer to individual topics[2]. Researchers have studied the wide use of owl:sameAs statement to link individuals in LOD and the quantitative analysis of owl:sameAs deployment status has also been done[32]. The result is that some user E (which can be A,B…) can see the complete view of syllabus topics which is a merged version of all the syllabus ontologies. This ontology is linked to the LOD (linked open data) cloud through the use of Dublin metadata ontology namespace as described in section 6.1 .As the ontology visible to E is linked to the LOD cloud ,user F is now able to see the complete ontology and can perform complex inferences over the LOD cloud. The open world assumption of OWL ontologies implies that the absence of a class does not imply that it does not exist helps in making the syllabus open to evolution and augmentation thus highly suitable for collaborative learning This is unlike the conventional closed world databases which are highly resistant to schema change and hence it is becomes very difficult to accommodate new syllabus documents as the system evolves. Moreover the open world assumption of the OWL syllabus ontology allows SMEs to easily add , merge and filter different syllabi aiding in personalization of syllabus. This personalization will act as a stepping stone towards personalized generation of textbooks from custom syllabus ontology documents.