An ontological framework to support the creation and use of phenomenograpical knowledge

The design of effective teaching and learning activities should create an experience able to elicit the intended learning outcomes of the focal educational unit. For this purpose, it is fundamental to account for the different ways students can experience the specific content taught. One of the few methods to investigate this issue is phenomenology, a powerful yet not extensively applied tool. The main reason lies in the lack of a structured approach to document phenomenological studies. This work proposes an ontological framework able to capture the main operational concepts and semantic of this body of knowledge. This framework can be used as basis to make explicit the domain assumption enabling the sharing of common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents. This, in turn, opens the possibility to analyze, reuse and maintain phenomenological knowledge.