Using ontology as scaffolding for authoring teaching materials

This article introduces mathematics ontology as a means of supporting teachers for authoring teaching materials. The purpose of this study is to conduct teachers to author a teaching material by using visualized domain ontology as scaffolding on a Content Repository Management System (CRMS). Although the domain ontology of mathematics at the secondary school level in Taiwan provides structured vocabularies for describing domain content, for those teachers who want to create a knowledge-rich description of domain knowledge, such as required by the "semantic Web, using ontology turns out to provide only part of the knowledge required. In the article, we examine problems related to capturing the learning resources or Learning Objects (LOs) on the CRMS. To construct ontology for a subset of mathematics course descriptions, the representation requirements by Resource Description Framework/Resource Description Framework Schema (RDF/RDFS) was implemented. Furthermore, a Visualized Online Authoring Tool (VOAT) is designed for authoring teaching materials on the Web. Finally, discussion and future research are addressed.