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     Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology


Learning Support with Semantic Forum System

Hazalina Hashim and Shahrul Azman Mohd Noah
Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology  2015  5:523-531
http://dx.doi.org/10.19026/rjaset.11.1857  |  © The Author(s) 2015
Received: May ‎16, ‎2015  |  Accepted: ‎June ‎22, ‎2015  |  Published: October 15, 2015

Abstract

Learning support is a service offers to assist learners learning process towards a desirable educational goal. Learning support is pertinent to fulfill the learning requirement and to complement the lack of interaction with tutors in e-learning education. However, there raise a concern that learning support provided is not effective enough to provide fast response to inquiries, relevant content of interest and reuse past discussion to resolve issues and difficulties in learning. Nevertheless, the ontological approach from semantic web technologies implementation offer certain affordance to enhance the learning support towards greater possibility as an effective e-learning facility. As such, it is the interest of this study to propose and introduce an ontological-based semantic forum by reusing the knowledge obtained from course modules and past forum discussion in order to enhance the learning support. Thus, a brief description of semantic forum development is presented in the acquisition and modelling the knowledge into an ontological structure. As well as evaluation conducted to ensure the effectiveness of the system use in enhancing learners’ understanding of the subject. This study contributes to a new approach of learning support with new facilities designed to provide more meaningful and relevant learning materials that able to accomodate the desirable learning outcome.

Keywords:

Domain ontology, e-learning, forum discussion, ontology development, semantic web technology, web application,


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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.

ISSN (Online):  2040-7467
ISSN (Print):   2040-7459
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