An ontology-based planning system for e-course generation

Researchers in the area of educational software have always shown great interest in the automatic synthesis of learning curricula. During the recent years, with the extensive use of metadata and the emergence of the Semantic Web, this vision is gradually turning into a reality. A number of systems for curricula synthesis have been proposed. These systems are based on strong relations defined in the metadata of learning objects, which allow them to be combined with other learning objects, in order to form a complete educational program. This article presents PASER, a system for automatically synthesizing curricula using AI Planning and Semantic Web technologies. The use of classical planning techniques allows the system to dynamically construct learning paths even from disjoint learning objects, meeting the learner’s profile, preferences, needs and abilities.