Ontology for Constructively Aligned, Collaborative, and Evolving Engineer Knowledge-Management Platforms

The fast pace of technological development in the domain of engineering forces higher education institutions to continuously adapt their learning materials to offer up-to-date skills and knowledge to learners. In this context, cooperation among universities to develop educational units is a strategy that allows the efficient utilization of resources to meet the aforementioned challenge. Cooperation, per se, can be problematic due to different standards and approaches in describing the process related with learning. Constructive Alignment has emerged as a method that allows higher education institutions to both implement a modern pedagogical approach and standardize the related communication of learning content and context. This article investigates models that can be used to support the creation, use, and sharing of constructively aligned content and, building upon previous research, proposes an updated version of the CONstructiveALIgnment (CONALI) ontology. The aim is to extend its usage to the development of an online collaborative platform for the management of digitalized knowledge (e.g., educational material). In detail, this work, starting from the requirements emerged in the context of an Erasmus project, updates the CONALI 2.0 ontology, defining new key reference concepts and semantic relations between these concepts. These will enable a semantically rich description of the knowledge base content and a formal structure of the online platform utilizing ontology web language. This work showcases the application of the developed CONALI 3.0 ontology to four use cases from Universities in the Erasmus project consortium and serves as starting point for the initiation of a more dynamic, digitalized, and aligned educational knowledge base on collaborative platforms.