ONTOLOGIES - FACILITATORS FOR CURRICULUM DESIGN IN CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Abstract

Ontologies are engineering artefacts which reduce conceptual and terminological confusion by providing a unified framework for describing the concepts of the world and their relations. Thus, they improve communication and cooperation between people and organizations. Also, ontologies are cross-platforms, cross-applications, thus they are facilitators for software interoperability, and they provide reusability, reliability, specification. In e-learning, ontologies are used to improve personalization, search and retrieval, learning domain description, learner profile modelling, feedback implementation, assessment, but also curriculum modelling and management. In this paper, we focus on this last-mentioned application of ontologies. In curriculum development, ontologies foster the transparency, collaboration, exchangeability and interoperability, support the alignment, classification, comparison, and matching between universities, educational systems or relevant disciplines, help in managing the educational offerings of an institution, revealing useful information like course overlapping, uncovered or less covered areas, possible synergies between courses, support course recommendation. Besides highlighting the best practices of ontologies in curriculum development (e.g. the Bowlogna Ontology, the BBC Curricula Ontology or the CCSO ontology), we propose an ontological model for curriculum design in centres of excellence in engineering education developed within the Erasmus+ Capacity Building EXTEND project and underline the possible advantages brought by them in the network of centres - knowledge transfer between centres in different countries and regions, exchange activities between those centres, double graduation certificates and so on. Also, our proposed ontology contains the competences which are considered necessary results for a teacher training program in engineering education within EXTEND framework and facilitates the interrogation of the curriculum via dedicated SPARQL queries.