An Ontological Framework for the Analysis of Constructively Aligned Educational Units

摘要

Higher education institutions are increasingly abandoning traditional teaching methods based on transmissive pedagogy and embracing a model based on the constructivist theory of learning. This is a necessary shift to face current challenges in their domain such as shrinking resources and need to reach students with different level of motivation and learning styles. Constructive Alignment (CA) combines the new pedagogical approach with aligned design for outcome-based teaching education and it is the leading approach underpinning current requirements for program specification and single course description. Another important trend emerging from digitalization of higher education is the collection and use of educational data to improve all the aspects of the learning process. This research community has produced a large body of valuable tools and methods, but there is no specific contribution targeting the analysis of constructively aligned education. The CONALI ontology is an ongoing modelling effort that currently provides a framework to describe the CA body of knowledge including all the relevant semantic relationships. This paper presents a new version of such ontology that supports collection and analysis of educational data from constructively aligned educational units as a first step to fill the gap described above. The specific requirements for this iterative upgrade have been inferred from a literature review of the typical analysis conducted in the domain of educational big data.