An ontology-driven framework for specifying, adapting and implementing educational settings

Abstract

Learning institutions can work in very different manners, but they all share many common and regularly repeated processes. The unambiguous specification of both the processes involved in educational activities and how to adapt such processes to different contexts have not been covered by standards and specifications up to now. Therefore, processes are usually defined from scratch, even when they share and can reuse a great deal of other processes. Taking into account all learning institutions share many common and regularly repeated processes and the high number of information systems involved in educational activities, this lack of specification, reutilization and integration may be very limiting; making the deployment of educational processes repetitive and costly, while they could be easily automated. The goal of the presented research is to address this problem, by providing a system to facilitate the specification of educational processes, to promote their reusability and adaptability and to automate their implementation. To do so, the paper presents an integrated ontological framework that allows creating (or reusing) generic educational processes, adapting them to the particularities of each organization and generating part of their implementations. The framework has been constructed integrating different existing ontologies by providing an intermediate ontological level that connects them. The paper describes the details of the framework, evaluates its feasibility, shows some of its limitations and provides its improvement opportunities. The evaluation was carried out in the context of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), a real, complex and representative educational setting.