Using Ontology as Scaffolding for Authoring Teaching Materials

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to conduct teachers to author a teaching material by using visualized domain ontology as scaffolding. Based on a content repository management system (CRMS), mathematics ontology to support teachers for authoring teaching materials is developed. Although the domain ontology of mathematics at secondary school level in Taiwan provides structured vocabularies for describing domain content, those teachers who want to create a knowledge-rich description of domain knowledge, such as required by the “Semantic Web,” use ontology that turns out to provide only part of knowledge required. In this chapter, we examine problems related to capturing the learning resources or learning objects (LOs) on a CRMS. To construct ontology for a subset of mathematics course descriptions, the representation requirements by resource description framework/resource description framework schema (RDF/RDFS) was implemented. Furthermore, a visualized online authoring tool (VOAT) is designed for authoring teaching materials on the Web. Finally, discussion and future research are addressed.