Tailoring learning through ontological thinking

How different levels of abstraction of ontologies help describe subject matter

Introduction

There is no single way of going about designing and tailoring content (e.g. training material, teaching books, lecture teaching content, etc.) for learning and development purposes. It all boils down to what you want to give to your audience and how you go about doing that. If you are a teacher or instructor, there’s a strong likelihood that the composition of your learning content will have a somewhat subjective dimension to it — and this is totally fine, because at the end of the day, you’re the person composing the training material. The idea is that if you understand your audience needs, then you’re heading in the right path for producing good learning content.

When trying to influence people, whether through teaching or other means, one important thing to observe is not to force your frame on them. What do we mean by that? Basically, what you perceive as being a meaningful perspective for you, doesn’t necessarily have the same value or meaning to someone else, and realising this is really key to ensuring the successful delivery of learning content. In fact, there’s a really good video that introduces the whole idea of understanding our frame and that of the audience, when trying to influence people. Check it out here.

Ontological thinking for cross-audience learning

So this got me thinking, what’s a valid approach for composing learning content without imposing our frame on our audience? Remember that an audience may be composed of people with significantly different ways of viewing things. What immediately popped into my mind was the whole idea of looking at how to teach a topic by approaching it from an ontological perspective. In other words, the key question being addressed here is:

Are we able to apply ontological thinking for composing learning content so as to make it as audience-agnostic as possible? If so, how?

The answer to the first question is in my view a ‘yes’ and there are several reasons why I believe that’s the case and also how we could go about applying ontological thinking to deliver learning experience.

Levels of abstraction of ontologies

Ontologies occupy different levels of abstraction and these levels can be used as a basis for explaining what a topic is, starting with the more generic ideas and progressing to the more specific ones. The featured diagram in this article displays the levels of abstraction of concepts in ontological thinking.

Foundational ontologies

There’s the foundational level which provides a broad basis for defining the concepts that are common to all knowledge domains. Foundational level concepts include notions like concrete objects (which include such things like locations, people, products, etc.), abstract objects (e.g. ideas, thoughts, conceptual characteristics, etc.), things that unfold with time (e.g. events, occurrences, etc.), and so on. These ontological concepts capture the most fundamental building blocks of subject matter and, therefore, can be used to explain the broad context of a topic and in the most generic way possible. Using that broad basis, we can then build on top of it in terms of explaining increasingly complex stuff.

For example, if we wanted to design learning content for a complex field like retail merchandising, we could approach it by first looking at the core building blocks of buying and merchandising — basically, the foundational concepts that provide a bird’s eye view of the subject matter. For example, some of the high-level perspectives in buying and merchandising are the product, supply chain, people, process, technology and numerical/reporting perspectives.

Middle level ontologies

Middle level ontologies are context oriented, so this where we should be able to start developing the subject matter further, explaining more detailed perspectives and understanding. For example, this could cover how the foundational perspectives translate into more focused viewpoints like marketing, sales, new product introduction, finance and so on.

User level ontologies

The top portion of our abstraction pyramid is for user level ontology concepts. This is where, for example, we could discuss case studies by exemplifying the understanding coming from the previous levels of the ontology abstraction stack through real cases, scenarios, etc.

Conclusion

The good thing with ontological thinking is that it allows us to factor out viewpoint-specific implications and, therefore, provides us with a basis for explaining a topic in an almost neutral way — basically an audience-agnostic way of composing learning content.

To summarise, tailoring learning content through ontological thinking requires us to start off with the most basic and high-level concepts that provide the building blocks of some subject matter and then, we are able to build on top of that to explain further levels of detail and specificity.

Also, the idea of applying ontological thinking for tailoring learning is that we are able to explain things following a logical progression path, and without losing track of the fundamentals. The benefits could be things like more enjoyable learning experience, wider reach, and ease of getting our heads around some topic.