Ontology for Academic Program Accreditation

Many educational institutions are adopting national and international accreditation programs to improve teaching, student learning, and curriculum. There is a growing demand across higher education for automation and helpful educational resources to continuously improve student outcomes. The student outcomes are the required knowledge and skill set that graduates of any accredited program have to gain in order entry into the workforce or for to continue with their future education. To evaluate student outcomes, each assessment activities must map to a course learning outcomes which maps students’ outcomes. The problem is that all course learning outcomes and student outcome mapping are placed in documents or database which requires more work and time to access and understand. This paper proposes an ontology based solution to enable visual discover of all course learning outcomes that maps to a particular student outcome and related assessments to help faculty or curriculum committees avoid over mapping or under mapping students’ outcomes. Keywords—Accreditation; Ontology; Semantic Web; classification; Education