Special purpose ontologies and the representation of pedagogical knowledge

In intelligent learning/tutoring environments which deal with several types of knowledge or with knowledge in complex domains, some form of pedagogical and curriculum knowledge must be represented in order for the ITS to offer guidance and structure in the learning process. In this paper we illustrate how pedagogical knowledge is represented by various instructional theories and ITS systems, discuss a number of key issues involved in authoring pedagogical knowledge, and show how these issues are addressed in the representational framework of the Eon ITS authoring tools. Unique among the methods we use are Ontology objects, which allow for the creation of representational frameworks tailored to classes of domains or tasks, and ''topic levels,'' which provide an additional level of sophistication beyond network representations, while increasing cognitive clarity.