Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System

Abstract

Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) system, which appears to be neither flexible nor transparent. We offer an ICT solution to provide the needed transparency. We show that such transparency is urgently needed for the structural reform of this system, in order to empower people and recover their trust and respect toward HE. The solution is based on ontology-driven portal as a digital ecosystem for national QA. We show how the content of the portal can be managed and verified based on users' social activity and reputation management, and how the quality evaluations of different players can be made with personalized procedures and quality indicators.