A framework for developing components of pedagogical knowledge

Abstract

The paper describes a part of the OBOA model of intelligent systems, the part concerned with pedagogical knowledge. Pedagogical knowledge is an important content of different intelligent systems, including learning systems, instructional systems, expert systems, intelligent interfaces, etc. Many models of pedagogical knowledge and different pedagogical strategies have been developed so far, but their design is usually not treated explicitly in the literature. Hence the process of building pedagogical knowledge into different intelligent systems seldom follows an explicitly stated, systematic design procedure. In the OBOA model, pedagogical knowledge is highly structured and is described by a set of concepts relations and corresponding software components and tools of different complexity. In support of the model, a toolkit for representing pedagogical knowledge is developed. Its components are flexible, easily extensible and modifiable, highly reusable, and constitute a design basis for building pedagogical knowledge into a wide spectrum of intelligent systems. Examples are shown of how such components are used in real-world applications, and how unified and flexible the approach is. Designing and building pedagogical knowledge into an intelligent system using these components doesn't restrict the system developer. The components only provide a good starting point for exploring different design alternatives, and being a part of a much larger and well-founded design framework and development toolkit, they make application design and development more systematic and more effective.