A Knowledge Engineering Method to Represent and Optimize Learning Processes and its Empirical Validation

Modeling, processing, evaluating and refining processes with humans involved like (not only, but also e-) learning is an exciting new application of Knowledge Engineering. A formerly developed concept called storyboarding has been applied at Tokyo Denki University to model the various ways to study at this university and visualize them in a graphical way, that allows to keep an overview by a hierarchy of nested graphs. The paper reports the development and validation of a data mining technology to estimate success chances of curricula based on storyboarding. Further, it discusses chances to improve these results by implementing a formerly introduced learner profiling concept that represents the students' individual properties, talents and preferences for personalized data mining.