Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System

Abstract

Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) system, which appears to be neither flexible nor transparent. We offer an ICT solution to provide the needed transparency. We show that such transparency is urgently needed for the structural reform of this system, in order to empower people and recover their trust and respect toward HE. The solution is based on ontology-driven portal as a digital ecosystem for national QA. We show how the content of the portal can be managed and verified based on users' social activity and reputation management, and how the quality evaluations of different players can be made with personalized procedures and quality indicators.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• human development
• higher education
• quality assurance
• semantic portal

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, who helped to essentially improve the paper.

Funding

This research has been supported in part by the TEMPUS [grant number 516935-TEMPUS-1-2011-1-FITEMPUS-SMGR] for the project TRUST: “Towards Trust in Quality Assurance Systems.” The authors appreciate the collaboration and support they have received from the international team of this project.

Notes on contributors

Vagan Terziyan is Professor in Distributed Systems, Department of Mathematical Information Technology, University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). He got his MSc degree in Applied Mathematics (1981), PhD in Artificial Intelligence (1985), and Habilitation (1993) in Knowledge Engineering – all from Kharkov National University of Radioelectronics (KNURE). He has also academic title of Professor in Software Engineering granted by the State Attestation Committee of Ukraine. His area of expertise includes distributed self-managed systems, semantic Web, agent-based systems, knowledge management and engineering, education management, and others.

Mariia Golovianko graduated in 2006 from KNURE as MSc in Artificial Intelligence. In 2011, she defended a PhD thesis: Ontology-based Methods and Models of Web-content Verification. Now she works as a Senior Lecturer at the Artificial Intelligence Department of KNURE and also as an expert in development and implementation of semantic technologies, AI and Web 2.0 into educational and scientific processes. She took part in several national and international projects on ontology-based resource management and quality assurance in education.

Oleksandr Shevchenko graduated in 2002 from KNURE as MEng in Intelligent Decision-support Systems. In 2006 he defended a PhD thesis: Intelligent System for Ontology-based Management and Integration of Heterogeneous Information. Now he works as an Associate Professor at the Artificial Intelligence Department of KNURE and also as an expert in self-managed systems, educational ontologies and portals, information systems, and software engineering. He took part in several national and international projects as an expert in ontology engineering, cloud computing, and as educational portals architect.