Abstract
•A collaborative learning approach is presented for e-learning systems.•A well-formed semantic model for co-learning is proposed.•Developed a tool that represents course content graphically with semantic meaning.•Demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach through experiments.
Co-learning of a course by students in an educational institute is becoming a common practice due to the bulk of resources available in the Web, existence of a large number of textbooks, and other offline materials. However, sometimes, students are mystified due the existence of different styles of presentations, definitions, terminologies and examples of a common subject in those sources. This is also true for professors who want to design a course material and teach students in a standard way. Considering the need of well-formed and standard teaching and co-learning materials, in this paper we propose a model that assists professors to design a course. We develop a tool that represents course content graphically with illustrations and semantic meaning. The proposed model is an automated semantic e-learning system based on BNF rules and the OWL ontology language that is capable of representing course contents using ontology. We also demonstrate the feasibility of this model through experiments using the BNF grammar for a programming language as a studying course.