Designing Culturally-aware Tutoring Systems with Mauoc, the More Advanced Upper Ontology of Culture

TEL systems are reaching societies where they were almost completely unavailable previously. This makes the importance of culture in TEL systems more salient as they need to accommodate an expanding cultural-geographical user base. Indeed it is known that culture has a huge impact on educational expectations and norms, and the way people efficiently learn. However, culture remains a difficult concept to integrate into the already complex TEL microcosm, and the design and development of theory-grounded Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems (CATS) thus requires guidance. The More Advanced Upper Ontology of Culture (MAUOC) is introduced in this paper as a way to address the theoretical gap. It concentrates and structures in one place the many scientificgrade notions needed to get a coherent view of the cultural domain while translating them into a common ground. As such, it offers theory-grounded guidelines for culture integration in TEL.