A Semantic Approach to Curriculum Development & Management: Integrating a 5-Phased Redesign, ABC Learning Design, and GeoCourseHub Ontology for Multi-Modal Geospatial Education

Practice Paper Recommended citation: Primera, R. C., Blanford, J. I., Lemmens, R. L., & Ronzhin, S. (2025). A Semantic Approach to Curriculum Development & Management: Integrating a 5-Phased Redesign, ABC Learning Design, and GeoCourseHub Ontology for Multi-Modal Geospatial Education. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631391. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. A SEMANTIC APPROACH TO CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT & MANAGEMENT: INTEGRATING A 5-PHASED REDESIGN, ABC LEARNING DESIGN, AND GEO COURSE HUB ONTOLOGY FOR MULTI-MODAL GEOSPATIAL EDUCATION Roseidys C.M. Primera 1 University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2129-7455 Justine I. Blanford University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0844-9390 Rob L.G. Lemmens University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5269-6343 Stanislav Ronzhin University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0339-3017 Conference Key Areas: Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering, Continuing education and life-long learning in engineering Keywords: curriculum development, curriculum management, reusable education, body of knowledge/knowledge graphs, learning paths 1 R.C.M. Primera [email protected] ABSTRACT Higher education institutions face increasing pressure to adapt curricula for flexible and online learning environments while ensuring alignment with evolving industry and learning needs. This practice paper presents a holistic framework for curriculum innovation, integrating three key components: a structured approach to curriculum redesign, a collaborative course design methodology, and semantic web technologies for curriculum management and development. This integrated approach provides a robust and scalable solution for orchestrating curriculum innovation, ensuring that educational programs remain relevant, engaging, and adaptable in the face of rapidly changing technological and societal demands. By combining strategic vision with practical methods and technological support, this framework empowers institutions to build a FAIR education. The framework presented here is applicable to BSc and MSc engineering programmes in need of managing, developing and evaluating curricula. 1. INTRODUCTION The landscape of higher education is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the increasing demand for online and blended learning options and the rapid evolution of technology and industry needs while still being able to deliver engaging face-to-face educational experiences. Educational institutions are challenged to create flexible, multimodal curricula that not only accommodate diverse student needs but also equip graduates with the skills and competencies required to thrive in a rapidly changing world (Blanford and Verplanke, 2023). Successfully navigating this transformation requires a holistic approach that enables educational programmes to manage, develop and evaluate curricula. To achieve this, a comprehensive framework for curriculum innovation is proposed that integrates strategic curriculum redesign and collaborative course design with semantic technology. The framework consists of three key elements: • A structured, 5-phased approach to curriculum redesign that enables institutions to systematically analyse, evaluate, and update their educational programs to address gaps and redundancies and align with evolving industry needs (Blanford and Verplanke, 2023). • An adapted ABC Learning Design method which is a collaborative, hands-on approach to course (re)design that promotes active learning, constructive alignment, and student engagement (King et al., 2024). • The Geo Course Hub ontology, a semantic web technology-based platform for managing curriculum metadata, facilitating personalized learning paths, and enhancing the accessibility and reusability of course content (Ronzhin et al.,2024). Fig 1: Integrated framework: 5phased approach, adapted ABC learning design & Geo Course Hub ontology technologies. The framework combines a 5-phased curriculum redesign process, an adapted ABC Learning Design method, and the Geo Course Hub ontology (Fig.1). The goal of this framework is to create sustainable, flexible, multi-modal courses. This framework is being applied to a master's programme in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (M-GEO) at the University of Twente within the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation. 1.1. Curriculum Redesign (5-Phased Approach) (Blanford & Verplanke, 2023) The curriculum redesign process consists of five phases: Inventory, Analysis, Evaluation, Design, and Implementation. The Inventory phase captures teaching and learning elements like course information, learning outcomes, assessment methods, learning activities, and topics. During the Analysis phase, the staff involved (programme management and educational support staff) analysed collected data to identify didactic methods, assessment types, and topics taught, using descriptive statistics and text analysis to examine curriculum relationships and gaps. The Evaluation phase assesses the education program using inventory and analysis findings, combined with external inputs from advisory boards, surveys, workshops, and collaborative sessions. The Design phase conceptualizes (design a draft plan of) the curriculum for multi-modal learning environments, using storyboarding techniques to visualize courses. Finally, the Implementation phase introduces new courses and curricula, considering the impact on students in multi-year programs. 1.2. Collaborative Course (Re)Design (Adapted ABC Learning Design Method) (King et al., 2024) The Collaborative Course (Re)Design process uses the ABC Learning Design method in a series of workshops to collaboratively design or redesign courses with an active learning approach (Young and Perović, 2016). Key steps include icebreakers to promote discussion, creating a storyboard using learning types, selecting learning activities, and evaluating the storyboard. Modifications to the storyboard involve incorporating, a Course Profile, Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) and assessments for constructive alignment, using a vertical layout for easier checking, assessing student workload based on ECTS credits, and using digital tools like MS Excel for data management. The ABC Learning Design method has been adapted from University College London (UCL). 1.3. Curriculum Management (Geo Course Hub Ontology) (Lemmens et al.,2023; Ronzhin et al., 2024) The Geo Course Hub (GCH) is a platform developed to manage curriculum metadata. The GCH platform is based on semantic web technologies and aims to improve flexibility in building and updating courses, enable management of education offerings, support personalized learning paths, facilitate collaborative course creation, and provide a single point of access to curriculum information. It uses linked data as a backbone to create links between any of the metadata elements of the courses, such as learning outcomes, course activities, course topics, etc. (Fig.2a). The Geo Course Hub architecture decouples data from its applications. The metadata is stored as linked data in a triple store (Fig.2b). Its layered architecture facilitates: • Semantic Web Technology Stack: The Semantic Web technology stack is used to represent and capture curriculum information, enabling the realization of FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). The FAIR principles are: Findability (to be able to find), Accessibility (to be able to access), Interoperability (to be able to integrate data from multiple resources), and Reusability (to be able to reuse). • Enrichment of Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs): ILOs are enriched with links to relevant domain concepts and Bloom's level indication (Bloom et al., 1956). This approach allows for a nuanced understanding of learning outcomes and fosters semantic modelling of course content (Fig.2a). • Loosely Coupled System Design: A loosely coupled system is designed, relying on a layer of programmable data interfaces. The platform consists of independent software applications that use GCH data via SPARQL (linked data query language) 2 , REST, and Elastic Search connections. Fig 2: (a) Breakdown of course elements of which metadata is stored in Geo Course Hub. (b) Geo Course Hub system architecture. 2. CONTEXT AND PRACTICAL WORK 2.1. Development and Applications of Geo Course Hub The Geo Course Hub platform core components such as the GCH ontology, data persistence layer, data API layer, and Browser (Fig.1-2) were developed. The GCH platform was designed to facilitate the management of curriculum metadata and offers a variety of functions (Fig.1-2). The main functions the GCH applications can be used for: • Browse courses: The platform enables for users to search materials on a specific topic, skill or software used. • Evaluate curriculum: Enables for programme management of education offerings to identify similarities between courses, identify overlaps as well as gaps. • Designing learning pathways and courses: Since the information is provided as individual units, these can be used to develop personalized learning pathways as well as be able to combine units into a single course. 2 SPARQL: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql12-query/ a b A website that includes the GCH applications has been developed using the Linked Data Reactor Framework (Khalili and de Graaf, 2017) to facilitate testing by both teaching staff and programme managers (see Fig. 3). Fig 3: Screenshot of the website developed to showcase GCH applications Furthermore, GCH has also been developed to collect data of course offerings that are multi-modal. All types of information on delivery modes of education can be collected. GCH is also intended to be used for life-long learning education, together with another faculty project focused on a geo-information online academy platform to offer online courses (mainly MOOCS) (Geoversity, 2024). 2.2. Intended Technological Benefits of Geo Course Hub GCH together with the 5-phased curriculum redesign approach and the adapted ABC learning design method can have multiple technological benefits: • Improving flexibility in building new courses and updating existing ones. • Querying all data integrally, allowing federated (over multiple data sources) querying with the SPARQL query language. • Managing and retrieving data via read-write SPARQL and REST interfaces. This allows external applications to connect to the course metadata via a standardised approach. • Supporting course topic exploration using linked data storage of course metadata, annotated with content from domain ontologies, e.g. conceptually representing the domain of geo-information technology (the domain of M-GEO). And possibility to connect to more than one ontology. 2.3. Workshops & Interviews During 2023 and 2024 several workshops were conducted to storyboard courses as described in King et al. (2024). The output of these served as metadata input to the Geo Course Hub applications. Several applications and connections were envisioned (Fig. 2b). The pilots and user testing mainly focused on the Browser, Analyser and Suggester. User testing was conducted on the Browser to provide access and exploration to the master courses of the faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, the Analyser to provide analysis and evaluation of the curriculum for programme management, and the Suggester to provide information about the curriculum to students. User testing consisted of three methods, (1) workshops and (2) interviews with teaching staff and (3) interviews with programme management staff. During these workshops and interviews all course information from the design of 20242025 and the redesign 2025-2026 of the Master’s programme in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation was collected. The type of course information collected are programme, specialization, learning outcomes, topics, bloom level, course unit, course teacher, course material (including software) and course learning activities (Fig. 2). Furthermore, during the interviews we asked teaching staff and programme management staff several questions focusing on the FAIR components; (1) could they find the information they were looking for, (2) is the information easily accessible? And (3) could they reuse this information for developing a new course for example?. 3. RESULTS The results of the information gathered during the workshops and interviews highlighted some main positive aspects and some aspects that should be improved. Positive aspects mentioned were that it facilitated the findability and accessibility of the information within the M-GEO programme, including be able to find topics that multiple courses are covering. Most participants saw added value in exploring through the information available in the Browser, as input before they start designing a course or during the design of a course. Programme management expressed that it would be good to have a single point of contact for collecting information related to the programme. The results of the pilot and user testing also highlighted some aspects that should be improved: (1) A change of culture and processes: most academic staff are used to their way-of-working. Introducing new ways and more applications into an already highly complex ecosystem of applications available, is not ideal. So, to make this integrated approach better embedded in an institution, it should be clear and easy to use. (2) Granularity of meta-data: there is a lot of data that can be collected. During the pilots and user-testing it was clear that the amount of metadata gathered has to be limited to the most important and needed components. 4. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS The experiences at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente, incorporating a 5-phased curriculum redesign process, the adapted ABC Learning Design method, and the Geo Course Hub ontology, offer valuable conclusions and implications for higher education institutions seeking to innovate and adapt their curricula for the multi-modal age. The integrated framework supports focused on the use of GCH: • FAIR Principles in Curriculum Management: Implementing Semantic Web technologies and FAIR principles in curriculum management enhances the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of educational resources. • Potential of Centralized Curriculum Metadata: The Geo Course Hub (GCH) platform's centralized, semantically rich curriculum metadata can improve flexibility in building and updating courses. This enhanced search and discovery of learning resources can facilitate the creation of individualized learning paths. • Importance of Addressing Change Management: The process of curriculum innovation requires effective change management strategies, including upskilling staff, addressing resistance to change, and providing ongoing support and resources. • Structured Data for Continual Improvement: With all course information available in a structured format, institutions can easily search for courses and topics, visualize and analyse content, evaluate learning activities, and create personalized learning pathways. This structured approach allows for continual and gradual improvements to the curriculum. In summary, the integration of the 5-phased curriculum redesign process, the adapted ABC Learning Design method, and the Geo Course Hub ontology offers a robust framework for higher education institutions seeking to transform their curricula for the multi-modal age. 5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was partially funded by the Smarter Academic Year and the Ingenuity program of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente. Furthermore, I would also like to thank Janet King, e-learning specialist and instructional designer which was very much involved in facilitating the course design workshops and played a key part within the projects mentioned in this practice paper. And lastly, I would also like to thank all my colleagues within the education and elearning unit of the of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente.