Proactively serving educational demands in professional and lifelong learning contexts requires efficient management of fine-granular curriculum information. The challenge is that currently, curriculum management is fragmented across multiple university systems. Addressing this issue, GeoCourseHub (GCH) is poised to function as a centralized data platform. This platform not only facilitates requests for curriculum data from external applications but also serves as a repository for new data generated by these applications. The platform collects and converts conventional course content into searchable learning objects, enabling the creation of tailored learning paths. To date, the project has successfully delivered several key components, including the GCH ontology, a data persistence layer, a data API layer, and a data browser. These components provide access to information on 83 master courses offered by ITC, and more than 3500 space-related courses from across Europe for the Astraios course catalogue.
• • • improve flexibility in building new courses and updating existing ones enable management of education offerings, i.e., finding course content, identifying overlaps and gaps support personalized learning paths for customized learning creating courses collaboratively with partner universities and knowledge institutes provide a single point of access to curriculum information
The project has already shown its potential. As part of the Ingenuity program, GCH supports a
sister Ingenuity project, Geoversity [
The GeoCourseHub platform [
Decision 1: To use the Semantic Web technology stack to represent and capture curriculum information. The choice of technology enables the effective realization of FAIR [4] principles. This decision enables the use of a range of semantic standards to capture the semantics of the data. As a result, a GCH ontology was designed and implemented [5] supporting the reusability of the data. Interoperability of the data is achieved using formal semantics captured in domain ontologies and a format-agnostic data model – Resource Description Framework [6].
Decision 2: To enrich the representation of intended learning outcomes (ILOs) with links to relevant domain concepts as well as with the Bloom level [7] indication. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of learning outcomes at various levels of abstraction and fosters an environment conducive to the semantic modelling of course content. It enables semantic search over the ILOs. This ensures not only the findability of the GCH resources but also facilitates the creation of individualized learning paths. The core enabling prerequisite is the availability of a database of concepts to be used for annotation of ILOs. GCH can use a Body of Knowledge, a network of concepts and relations between them. This can be an existing BoK (e.g. EO4GEO Body of Knowledge [8]) or a custom-created BoK.
Decision 3: To design a loosely coupled system that relies on the layer of programmable data interfaces. The platform consists of several independent software applications that all use GCH data via three types of connections: SPARQL, REST, and Elastic Search. Browser and Register are the main two interfaces where users can browse, create, and manage curriculum metadata. Both applications are built using the Linked Data Reactor framework [9]. ITC’s Living Textbook [10] is used for authoring BoKs. Suggester is a yet-to-be-developed component that assists in the individual learning path construction. The above-mentioned are internal to the platform. External applications that consume GCH data are Geoversity and Moodle Learning Management System. Flexible and technology-diverse data interfaces together with user interfaces add to the accessibility of the data.
In its two years, with three employees (Stanislav Ronzhin, Rob Lemmens, and Roseidys Primera) the project managed to deliver several core components of the system including the GCH ontology, the data persistence layer, the data API layer, and the Browser. User testing was conducted on the Browser which provided access to 83 courses of the ITC’s master courses.
The current focus (period 2024-2025) of the project is threefold. First is further enriching our platform with course content and domain concepts (both according to the GCH ontology). Second is the implementation of the user testing results. This will further increase the usability of the platform. The third is to apply its use in different lifelong learning application scenarios and continue strengthening the integration with other external projects, in particular, the Shape Up project [11,12] and Geoversity. “Spatial data for design”, Volume 4, 2023 URL: https://agilegi.eu/images/conferences/2023/documents/posters/20.pdf [4] M. D. Wilkinson, M. Dumontier, Ij. J. Aalbersberg, G. Appleton, M. Axton, A. Baak, N. Blomberg, J.-W. Boiten, L. B. da Silva Santos, P. E. Bourne, J. Bouwman, A. J. Brookes, T. Clark, M. Crosas, I. Dillo, O. Dumon, S. Edmunds, C. T. Evelo, R. Finkers, … B. Mons, The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, Scientific Data 3 (2016) Article 1. doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18. [5] S. Ronzhin, R. Lemmens, R. Primera, Geo Course Hub Ontology, Specification Draft, 2024. URL: https://gch.utwente.nl/ontology [6] R. Cyganiak, D. Wood, M. Lanthaler, G. Klyne, J. J. Caroll, B. McBride, eds, RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax, 2014. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/ doi:10.1145/1219092.1219093 [7] B. S. Bloom, M. D. Engelhart, E. J. Furst, W. H. Hill, D. R. Krathwohl, Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, Vol. Handbook I: Cognitive domain, New York: David McKay Company, 1956. [8] R. Lemmens, S. Lang, F. Albrecht, E. Augustijn, C. Granell, M. Olijslagers, C. Pathe, C. Dubois, M. Stelmaszczuk-Górska, Integrating concepts of artificial intelligence in the EO4GEO body of knowledge, In S. Zlatanova, G. Sithole, J. Barton (Eds.), International Archives XXIV ISPRS Congress. doi:10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B4-2022-53-2022. [9] A. Khalili, K. A. de Graaf, Linked Data Reactor: Towards Data-aware User Interfaces, In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Semantic Systems, ACM, 2017, pp. 168-172. doi:10.1145/3132218.3132231. [10] E. W. Augustijn, R. Lemmens, M. J. Verkroost, S. Ronzhin, N. Walsh, The Living Textbook: Towards a new way of Teaching Geo-Science, Published online 2018. URL: https://research.utwente.nl/files/47277217/augustijn_aglie_2018_after_review.pdf [11] J.R. Buitenweg, Formulation Of The FIRIS-P Professional Core-Competency Framework For Flexible Academic Curricula: The Biomedical Engineering Program, Practice Papers. 2023. URL: https://doi.org/10.21427/EBPD-4X50 [12] J.R. Buitenweg, Shape-Up: Tool for competency aligned curriculum development and flexible study paths, Presentation slides, University of Twente, 2022. URL: https://www.utwente.nl/.uc/faea4a6cb01026ff8d001241cc7018ef45186e679775f00/20230906%20 Comenius%20info%20meeting%20-%20slides%20JanB.pdfM.