EDUC8: Self-evolving and personalized learning pathways utilizing semantics

During the last decade, educational institutions are implementing reforms geared towards improving student outcomes and quality of studies. Personalization of education services is one of the challenges to be confronted. However, personalization requires continuous reconfiguration of the learning schemes since the academic status of each student, program studies and circumstances inside an educational institution constantly change. In this paper, we present EDUC8 (EDUCATE) prototype that provides an information technology solution concerning the dynamic recommendation and execution of personalized education processes. The EDUC8 prototype comprises an educational process execution engine based on a semantic infrastructure for reconfiguring the learning pathways for each student. The semantic infrastructure consists of an ontological framework enclosing the required knowledge and a semantic rule-set. During the execution of learning pathways, the system reasons over the rules and reconfigures the next steps of the learning process. The rule-base is able to create new facts and update the EDUC8 ontology accordingly, thus creating new knowledge as each learning pathway evolves.