IDont: An Ontology Based Educational Modeling Framework for Instructional Design

It is inevitable to make use of technology to support 287 million adult illiterates of India spread across 22 Indian Languages and dialects. How to reduce the complexity during the creation and maintenance of adult literacy instructional design (goals, process, context, content and so on) while addressing large scale and variety? In this paper, we motivate the need for ontologies to address this inherent complexity in adult literacy problem. To this end, we present an ontology based educational modeling framework called IDont to capture different aspects of adult literacy instructional design. The core idea of this ontological framework is to systematize, separate and capture different aspects of adult literacy instructional design through several modular interrelated ontologies for context, goals, process, instructional material, role, evaluation and environment. Even though IDont is broadly applicable to all forms of educations in principle, we confine and present its application to adult literacy case study in this paper.