Ontological Representation of Academic Programs

Using legal terminology, academic institutions release teaching and examination regulations to form the statutory framework of academic programs. This terminology is one reason why students often do not know how to satisfy the program requirements laid down by the corresponding institutions. This can result in needlessly long study times. Frequent changes of those regulations and parallel valid different regulations forming the statutory framework of programs leading to the same degrees may aggravate those problems. Furthermore, academic boards have to supply an amount of courses which fits the studentsâ?? actual demand. This is a difficult task because there is only little information available for forecasting. In this paper, we present an ontology to handle these problems. It allows semantic representations of examination regulations and academic programs. Based upon this ontology, decision support systems can be implemented which can help students to decide how to satisfy the corresponding program regulations or which can help academic boards to forecast the studentsâ?? demand on certain courses

Saving Expenses With Technology Enhanced Learning

Long study terms and a large number of students who do not successfully finish their academic programs are damaging the national economies to a large tune. In addition, personal study guidance to attenuate these problems is very expensive, too. Misunderstanding of examination regulations and a possible adversely balanced supply and demand of courses can be reasons for increasing average study terms. In this paper, we describe how technology enhanced learning can help to save expenses in this field. Our approach is based upon an ontological representation of academic programs and examination regulations. It can help students in planning their curricula and identifying the contents of academic programs as well as academic boards to forecast the number of students which will presumably take a certain course in a certain term

This document is under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons Attribution Saving Expenses With Technology Enhanced Learning

Long study terms and a large number of students who do not successfully finish their academic programs are damaging the national economies to a large tune. In addition, personal study guidance to attenuate these problems is very expensive, too. Misunderstanding of examination regulations and a possible adversely balanced supply and demand of courses can be reasons for increasing average study terms. In this paper, we describe how technology enhanced learning can help to save expenses in this field. Our approach is based upon an ontological representation of academic programs and examination regulations. It can help students in planning their curricula and identifying the contents of academic programs as well as academic boards to forecast the number of students which will presumably take a certain course in a certain term.