Representing and Reasoning about Cultural Contexts in Intelligent Learning Environments

There is a growing interest within educational research to produce culturally-aware intelligent learning environments (ILEs) that capitalize on the affective benefits of positive cultural resonance and avoid the counter-productive effects of culturally ignorant designs. Several challenges arise when attempting to produce culturally-appropriate content for ILEs. These stem from the need for semantic representations of cultural conceptualisations that go beyond folk approaches, have sufficient details for intracultural reasoning, and which can be matched with the cultural backgrounds of students who use these ILEs. This paper tackles these challenges firstly through the formalism of a lower-level ontology for describing the cultural semantics commonly used in educational content and secondly with a software component for reasoning about this ontological knowledge in relation to student cultural backgrounds. An application was developed to test the practicality of the approach and assess its utility in locating culturally-appropriate educational resources for students. The evaluation results revealed that the majority of content selections made by the system were rated as highly appropriate by 90% of the participants on average and confirmed the viability of the approach.