Geo Course Hub: a FAIR platform for sharing modular education

Learn the content of courses, units, learning activities and materials. For example, find materials on a specific topic e.g., data quality.

For example, one can find all the courses where specific software (e.g., Google Earth Engine) is used.

Discover similarities and differences between courses and their elements. For example, find common topics of courses within a specialization.

The GCH knowldge graph is the heart of the system, a semantic framework for capturing course content and making it findable, reusable and interoperable.

• Rich metadata of education elements is supported by the use of domain Bodies of Knowledge, conncept schemas that represent domain knoweldge.
• Reuse of semantic standards and best practices from related domains (e.g., DC terms for metadata, SKOS for concepts) is preferred to improve crossdomain interoperability.
•  Multiple levels of granularity of educational activities must be supported ranging from a master degree programme to a short self-paced tutorial.
• Standardisation of terms within organisation is an important by-product of GCH development.  Class semantics must accomodate existing formal definitions and less formal “corridor” language

Course topic exploration by all users is facilitated by linked data storage of course metadata, which allows a flexible data query system as used in the semantic web, annotated with content from domain ontologies, which describe knowledge domains by conceptual models.

For the domain of Geo-information and Earth observation, we use the EO4GEO Body of Knowledge (BoK). This topic model contains 900+ interrelated concepts with short definitions that can be used to describe curricula.

Decoupling data from its application: GCH will serve as a central data platform from where other (external) applications can request data and where new data created by other (external) applications will be persisted.

Querying all the data as one: GCH content will be diverse and is expected to change frequently. It is needed to tie inconsistent data from other sources and query over them integrally allowing federated queriyng with the SAPRQL query language.

Data at the source: Data is never copied, no need to input the same data several times in different systems

Read-write SPARQL and REST interfaces: GCH provides APIs for data management and retrieval

The GCH process is being applied in various pilot projects at ITC. We are working in a flexible way that we adapt the model after learning from the pilots. While conducting the pilots we aligned with other educational projects taking place at the ITC, therefore it was chosen to also follow the ADDIE approach. 

Geo Course Hub is currently under development in close relationship with curriculum renewal of the Master programme in Geo-information science and Earth Observation and the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente.

Development phases we are working on:

1. Support prospective and enrolled students and staff to explore and combine content of different courses.
2. Construction of learning paths based on AI, as part of the web platform, connecting to job profiles and expert profiles.

Pro-actively serve educational demands in professional and lifelong learning

• Create courses collaboratively with partner universities and knowledge institutes.
• Improve flexibility in building new courses and updating existing ones
• Enable management of education offerings, i.e., finding course content, identifying overlaps and gaps
• Support personalized learning paths for customised learning
• Develop information infrastructure for education