An Ontology-Based Framework for Collecting E-Learning Resources

Abstract

The World Wide Web has an immense amount of e-learning resources for the various branches of science; these are available as textbooks, presentations, video tutorials, pictures, and audio lectures. There is no doubt that these resources would help students understand academic courses better, especially those courses that require training and practical activities, such as computer science courses. This would also help the instructor clarify his ideas in an interesting and innovative way. Searching for the available and suitable resources on the World Wide Web is a difficult and time-consuming task because it requires the exact specification of keywords that characterize each topic in the course syllabus. Collecting such material manually from scratch for each course in a specific domain of knowledge is an expensive and time-consuming effort. Ontology is the explicit formal specification of the terms and the relations among them in a specific domain. It defines a common vocabulary for researchers to share information. It is perhaps the key solution to the problems related to knowledge sharing and reuse due to the inclusion of machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts and their relationships. In this paper, a system is proposed to enable instructors to collect e-learning multimedia resources from the World Wide Web and automatically link them to the topics in the syllabus of the intended course using the ontology of the domain of knowledge related to the that course.