An alternative approach to ontology-based curriculum development in higher education

Global trends in higher education emphasize the development of curricula that offer greater responsiveness to learners. Creating flexible and responsive curricula will require additional support systems for curriculum management. The first step toward sustainably developing this kind of system is to represent essential curricular information in a way that allows sharing common components across various work processes within the educational environment. The current research implements a new approach for representing curriculum components, by systematically analyzing external source data to extract the basic knowledge, skills and dependencies which then become objects into an ontology. The resulting ontology should act as a computationally-accessible model of the curriculum with sufficient information and usable quality. This paper describes a trial implementation of our approach using actual curriculum documents. Results from performance metrics and expert evaluation validate the proposed strategy and suggest that the approach is feasible for real-world practice.