Ontological specification of an authoring interface for creating sustainable language learning content.

Abstract

The creation of language learning materials is very labor-intensive, but a lot of learning content gets lost at every change due to its inability to adapt to new technologies, products, services, pedagogical models and educational demands. For the educational publishing sector, this low reusability or lack of sustainability, combined with the high authoring cost, certainly for a small market like Flanders, seriously hampers the profitability, if not already the viability, of the activity. Learning content, on the other hand, is vital for the quality of educati on and, indirectly, for society in general. The objective of our current research is to deliver an ontological specification of an authoring interface for creating sustainable language learning content based on the identification of psychological requirements on the one hand, and on solving technological issues on the other. It is based on our object model for software architecture and database structuring: a model which is the result of more than 20 years of research and development in the field, and which has been thoroughly validated theoretically and empirically over the last couple of years. The result should be an ontological specification for publishers: the entire project should yield a significant reduction of production cost on the one hand, and an increase in sales on the other by opening up both their product range and their markets.