Knowledge graph based learning paths for a successful eLearning

Knowledge graph: what is it?

According to IBM Cloud Education, a knowledge graph “represents a network of real-world entities—i.e. objects, events, situations, or concepts—and illustrates the relationship between them”. A knowledge graph consists of nodes, edges, and labels. What are these? Well, anything can act as a node, for example concepts, topics, people, information sources. An edge connects a pair of nodes, expressing the relationship between them, whereas a label captures the meaning of this relationship. Basically, as this article shows, their purpose is to “help in organizing unstructured data in a way that information can easily be extracted where explicit relations between multiple entities help in the process”.

Knowledge graphs are used in various fields, but why would you use them in eLearning programs? As you’ve most probably experienced yourself, one of the biggest challenges in virtual learning is to extract and organise the information in a way that prevents its fragmentation. Put differently, learners want to have access to information whenever they need it, and searching for a concept among hundreds of learning resources and knowledge topics would waste their time and make them lose interest. Thus, you need to provide them with well-defined learning paths and thoroughly organized content as soon as possible. So, here’s your answer: you need knowledge graphs as a way to organise your learning resources. 

Benefits of a knowledge graph

A knowledge graph brings a series of benefits to the people involved in a learning process, being both a way to structure information and to have access to it quickly, which results in higher levels of efficiency. First of all, a knowledge graph provides a proper context, integrating various types of information into an ontology, while providing the flexibility to add new pieces of information on the go, enriching the perspective upon a certain topic. Also, they provide explainability, meaning that “large networks of entities and relations provide solutions for the issue of understandability by integrating the meaning of entities available within the graph itself” (source). 

How to actually integrate a knowledge graph into a LMS

As we've always said, here at Knolyx we try to bring the best in terms of learning, and that's why we constantly read about new best practices. We have implemented the communities of practice a while ago to ensure social learning, we offer the learning path tool to deliver a smooth structure for the topics that need to be covered and we've just started working on the graph function to help you organise the content. We know that when someone searches for a specific piece of information, one wants to find it right away, and a proper way of organizing content is needed for this.