The ORM Model as a Knowledge Representation for E-Tutorial Systems

At present information technology plays important roles in teaching and learning activities. E-learning systems have the potential to reduce operating costs and train more people. Teachers and students do not have to be in the same place at the same time and the students have the opportunity to perform self-studies and self-evaluation using e-tutorial systems. E-learning systems could be considered expert systems in the sense that they provide expert advice in particular subjects of studies to students. The exploitation of knowledge base and knowledge representation techniques is therefore vital to the development of e-learning systems. This paper presents the development of a knowledge-based e-tutorial system that uses the Object Role Model (ORM) as its knowledge representation. The system provides Physics tutorials. It was implemented in Prolog and the knowledge base is on a relational database server.