In our work, we assumed that vocabulary building is a critical prerequisite to teaching new material, and also a desired outcome.

New terms will appear in the course and are defined as those that the student has not yet encountered, and which do not appear in a standard dictionary.

Knowledge of the meaning of these new terms being introduced in the course can be achieved (in order of increasing desirability) by the student

1. giving up, or

2. guessing the meaning of the term,

3. searching the text for such terms or better,

4. looking at the alphabetic index for other places the same term is used to build up a personal definition of the term based on contextual use, or

5. by looking up the term in a field specific, (specialised) dictionary, or best,

6. looking up the term in an exemplary glossary presented at the beginning of the course.

So, our work extracted the new vocabulary terms being (overtly, or implicitly, or not) taught in a course, analysed the new vocabulary list of terms ontologically to determine the relationships between terms in the new vocabulary, and its hierarchic bushes. (Most new terms are defined in terms of other words in the vocabulary, so it is important to establish these clearly and then to teach the foundation words first, and gradually to build on that until the capstone terms are understood.) Concept maps proved useful. We have submitted our work for publication.

In your case, you can use the syllabus as a starting point in building a toy model, but need to advance to the full curriculum (statements of intent, plus all content) to analyse the glossary presented in the course, and then more importantly to include all the new terms used in the text, whether these be defined implicitly in the text or not at all in the text! Word analysis is insufficient as most concepts-to-be-learned are phrases.

Our initial idea was to mark each term in a student's hierarchical bush of new terms as being initialised with the Boolean: Know / Do not know, which gets updated with the learning progress.

If a student is sure that the student competently know all terms in a bush, then there is presumably no need to present that bush for learning to this particular student. Conversely for a student admitting ignorance.

In March, we are going to publish a paper using an ontology for curriculum comparison ("A Semantic Similarity Assessment Tool for Computer Science Subjects Using Extended Wu & Palmer’s Algorithm and Ontology"). If you're interested, contact me via private mail from RG.

Dear Joao Dias,

If by the word ontology you mean "An ontology is a (knowledge) representation that provides a shared and common understanding of a domain" then I would argue that all educational methods are ontological and in fact Piaget's cognitive development is an ontology. Hence one can very easily make a case for educational systems are ontological. 

The difference I believe you are referring to by referencing adaptive learning is the "delivery" or  "delivery system" in which the computer is used rather than a human. Here there also is nothing very new except the use of more "advanced technology". I would and could make a very compelling argument that adaptive learning is nothing new, it can be directly linked to what is called universal design which first was used in special education over two decades ago.

Hence my suggestion is to research universal design in education and then research using technology in the classroom or distance learning and combined the two adding technology and epistemology (probably using a constructionist theory) as Mr. Kennedy post suggests) into your own research and bingo, there you have the foundation on which to argue or answer the challenge as you write.

Hope this helps

Douglas 

See: Effective Authoring Procedure for E-learning Courses’ Development in Philological Curriculum Based on LOs Ideology // Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6562. Subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. 4th Language and Technology Conference, LTC 2009, Poznan, Poland, November 6-8, 2009, Revised Selected Papers. Vetulani, Zygmunt (Ed.) 1st Edition., 2011. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20095-3_35. Full text here: http://www.philol.msu.ru/~kedr/vetulani 

Dear João, Be aware that the  word 'ontology' has 2 meanings, one in philosophy and one in computer science. They mean different things:

1. The metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence.

2. A rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations [TheSage]

Maria Montessori was the first educator to develop a systemized approach based on the connection between ontology and epistemology. Through the use of her didactic materials, small children engaged a process of ontological transformation that also taught math and language. She called the process "normalization." 

I would like to thanks a lot the feedback received, and I apologize for not having replied before, because I was enjoying school holidays.

Dear Ian, Douglas and Kym,

I want to clarify that I use the concept of ontology based on Gruber (1), more comprehensive, according to which the ontology can be understood as a specification of a conceptualization, that is, a description of concepts and relationships that exist between these concepts, and of Borst (2), more specific, that defines ontology as a formal specification (something that can be recognized by computers) and explicit (concepts, properties, relations, functions, constraints, and explicitly defined axioms) of a conceptualization (abstract model of some real-world phenomenon) shared (consensual knowledge). Both authors emphasize the importance of ontology to facilitate the reuse and sharing of knowledge.

(1) GRUBER, Thomas. Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing. International Journal Human-Computer Studies v. 43, n. 5-6, p.907-928, 1995

(2) BORST, W.   Construction of Engineering Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. Tese de doutorado, University of Twente, Enschede - The Netherlands. Disponível em http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/17377/01/t0000004.pdf , acessado em 16/12/2014, 1997.

 Dear Donald,

I agree with you. My idea is to associate the ontological model of curriculum with student information, obtained from students and their interactions with the academic evaluation system and additionally through Big Data. With that, I believe into being the ability to customize access for students to the various learning resources based on multiple theories of learning, each proposing to suit different times of the teaching-learning process.

Dear Galina,

Thank you by the reference text.

Yes, I am doing my PhD using ontologies to describe biology curricula. In my case, the goal is to analyze the curricular structure and compare the curricula for different courses, from K8 to first university year.

Not sure if it will be helpful to you but we are developing a Living Textbook that combines ontology based concept maps with a digital textbook.

You can find more:

The Living Textbook: Towards a new way of Teaching Geo-Science

https://agile-online.org/index.php/conference/proceedings/proceedings-2018