Ontology and E-Learning: a Good Marriage

In the last decade the evolution on educational technologies forced an extraordinary interest in new methods for delivering learning content to learners. Distance education represents today an effective way for supporting and sometimes substituting the traditional formative processes, thanks to the technological improvements achieved in the field in recent years. However the role of technology has often been overestimated and on the other hand the amount of information students can obtain from the Internet is huge and they can easily be confused. Teachers can also be disconcerted by this quantity of contents and they are often unable to suggest the correct contents to their students. In the open scientific literature, it is widely recognized that an important factor of this success is related with the capability of customizing the learning process for the specific needs of a given learner. This feature is still far to have been reached and there is a real interest for investigating new approaches and tools to adapt the formative process on specific individual needs. In this scenario, the introduction of ontology formalism can improve the quality of formative process, allowing the introduction of new and effective services. Ontologies can lead to important improvements in the definition of courses knowledge domain, in the generation of adapted learning path and in the assessment phase. This paper provides an initial discussion of the role of ontologies in the context of e-learning. The improvements related to the introduction of ontologies formalism in the E-Learning field are discussed and a novel algorithm for ontology building through the use of Bayesian Networks is showed. Finally, its application in the assessment process and some experimental results are illustrated