NEW TECHNOLOGIES APPLIED TO TEACHING ENGINEERING DESIGN: ONTOLOGIES APPLIED IN THE MOODLE PLATFORM

In e-learning the knowledge contained in digital lectures and articles is generally used in platforms like Moodle and Blackboard. Among the various free open source software packages designed to create course management systems (CMSs), the most popular Moodle system owes its popularity not only to its technical characteristics, but to its flexible architecture.
In the other part, ontologies have a range of potential benefits and applications in further and higher education, including the sharing of information across educational systems, providing frameworks for learning object reuse, and enabling intelligent and personalized student support.
However, designing ontologies that could be shared for developing ontology-based learning environments is still a challenge. The overall aim of this paper was to provide a solution based in the Moodle Platform. The main idea behind the approach presented here is that an ontology can not only be useful as a learning instrument but it can also be employed to assess students’ skills. For it, each student is prompted to express his/her beliefs by building her/his own discipline-related ontology through an application displayed in the graphical user interface of Moodle system. Results of this work show the mistakenly understood parts of domain knowledge and help tutors improving distant courses. This paper demonstrates that this approach is much more efficient than usual tests, where some mistakes can be involved by ambiguous formulation of questions and misprints. In addition, in common tests correct answers can be obtained intuitively or by accident and do not reflect student’s actual knowledge about the topic under question.
In conclusion, ontologies have a range of potential benefits and applications in further and higher education, including the sharing of information across educational systems, providing frameworks for learning object reuse, and enabling intelligent and personalized student support. In this paper, we applied this system to some subjects of engineering design.