EDUC8 pathways: executing self-evolving and personalized intra-organizational educational processes

One of the main challenges to be confronted by modern tertiary sector, so as to improve quality is the personalization of learning, which has to be combined with a minimization of the respective costs. However, personalization requires continuous reconfiguration of the academic plans since the academic status of each student, educational options and circumstances inside a Higher Educational Institution constantly change. In this paper, we present EDUC8 (EDUCATE) software environment that provides an integrated information technology solution concerning the dynamic recommendation and execution of personalized education processes. The implemented EDUC8 prototype aggregates a process execution engine, a rule engine and a semantic infrastructure for reconfiguring the learning pathways for each student. The semantic infrastructure consists of an ontology 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. At the same time, new knowledge and facts originated from both the rule base and the learning pathway meta-models that are established during their execution are created, which constitute the evolving knowledge base of EDUC8 platform. The completeness and performance of the implemented infrastructure was tested for the modeling and selection of a set of appropriate academic recommendations regarding the Network Engineering specialization field of the Computer Science program.