Available online at ScienceDirect. Procedia Computer Science 35 (2014 )

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1 Available online at ScienceDirect Procedia Computer Science 35 (2014 ) th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems - KES2014 Extending Moodle functionalities with ontology-based competency management Kalthoum Rezgui*, Hédia Mhiri, Khaled Ghédira SOIE, Higher Institute of Management, University of Tunis, 41 rue de la Liberté, Cité Bouchoucha 2000 Le Bardo,Tunis, Tunisie Abstract The Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle is currently the most popular software solution which provides many modules for various teaching and learning purposes. However, several aspects relevant for competency management are typically missing in Moodle. This paper proposes an ontology-based competency management application which is developed as a Moodle extension for supporting the development and assessment of competencies inside a course. Details about the competency ontology adopted for designing the competency-based course structure as well as the competency management features embedded into Moodle are presented. By incorporating these features into a LMS, it becomes possible to manage target competencies together with their associated evidence items and assess proficiency levels reached by students for each target competency. In addition, it becomes possible to generate different types of competency reports depending on the target role (teachers, students or administrators) The Published Authors. by Published Elsevier B.V. by Elsevier This is B.V. an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Selection ( and peer-review under responsibility of KES International. Peer-review under responsibility of KES International. Keywords: Competencies; competency management; competency ontology; Moodle. 1. Introduction In Learning Management Systems (LMSs), a competency management tool is required for different types of competency-based learning support, such as competency-based learning program design 1,2,3 and competencybased learning resource retrieval 4,5. Besides, it helps identify individual competency gaps and direct * Corresponding author. address: kalthoum.rezgui@isg.rnu.tn Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( Peer-review under responsibility of KES International. doi: /j.procs

2 Kalthoum Rezgui et al. / Procedia Computer Science 35 ( 2014 ) personalized navigation in the Web-based learning environment which allows learners move expeditiously towards their goals. In this paper, we propose to extend the functionalities of the LMS Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) 6 by developing an ontology-based application for supporting competency assessment and development. We chose Moodle because it is provided freely and currently it s the most popular e-learning platform with over 85,000 registered sites worldwide, over 8 million courses, almost 76 million students, and over one million teachers 7. Besides, its open source nature and modular design allows developers to integrate external applications which may be needed to support specific functionalities. From the functional point of view, Moodle provides many modules for various teaching and learning activities, such as the assignment module, resource module, quiz module, and discussions forums. However, several aspects relevant for competency management are typically missing in Moodle. Actually, the Moodle system is missing a mechanism that allows teachers to: (i) manage target competency profiles associated with domain knowledge models defining content for the courses they are teaching and (ii) assess the acquisition of these profiles by their students based on evidences presented by these latters or captured during the performance of assessment activities/tasks. Besides, it lacks the functionality that enables students to view their actual competency proficiency levels. For these reasons, the functionalities of Moodle as a LMS needs to be extended so that it can provide a practical way to manage and assess competencies. In fact, by integrating a competency management application into Moodle, it becomes possible for teachers to manage target competencies for a course along with their associated evidence items and to keep track of students' progress on each target competency. Moreover, it becomes possible to generate different types of competency reports depending on the target role. The proposed application relies on a Competency ontology that we have developed to enable formal and semantic representation of competency definitions and their relationships. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: First, a brief description of the adopted competency ontology is presented. Next, details about the competency management features embedded into the Moodle platform are presented. The Entity-Relationship model showing the new tables added to the existing Moodle database schema is also presented in this part. Finally, suggestions for future works are outlined in the concluding part of this paper. 2. Overview of the competency ontology The competency management extension we propose is based on a Competency Ontology which has been developed in the OWL 8 to formalize the concepts of competency, competency evidence, and competency profile. The following figure (Fig. 1.) illustrates a graphical representation of the developed competency ontology. This ontology results from the analysis of different approaches to competency modeling and management described in the literature, such as those proposed by 5,9-19. In this ontology, the Competency class is related to: (i) a skill selected from a learning-domain skills taxonomy/ontology, (ii) a knowledge drawn from a learning-domain ontology, (iii) a context selected from a domain ontology, and (iv) the ProficiencyLevel class that enables to describe the actual proficiency level. The proposed ontology also enables formal representation of diverse kinds of dependency relationships between competencies, such as requires, similarto, iscomposedof. In addition, for each student, this ontology makes it possible to keep track of competency estimates (CompetencyRecord) and their associated EvidenceRecords. The CompetencyProfile class enables formal representation of collections of acquired or required competencies known as competency profiles. A competency profile describes a set of competencies together with associated proficiency levels.

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10 Kalthoum Rezgui et al. / Procedia Computer Science 35 ( 2014 ) Dougiamas M. An exploration of the use of an Open Source software called Moodle to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry. PhD thesis, Curtin University of Technology. 7. Lambda Solutions. Moodle market share statistics. show it s the market leader Available from: 8. Antoniou G, Harmelen F. Web ontology language: OWL. In: Staab S, Studer R, editors. Handbook on Ontologies. Berlin: Springer; p IMS RDCEO. IMS reusable definition of competency or educational objective specification Available from: Sicilia MA. Ontology-based competency management: Infrastructures for the knowledge intensive learning organization. In: Lytras MD, editors. Intelligent Learning Infrastructures in Knowledge Intensive Organizations: A Semantic Web Perspective. Hershey PA: Information Science Publishing; p HR-XML. HR-XML Competencies (Measurable Characteristics) Available from: Competencies-1_0.pdf 12. Schmidt A, Kunzmann C. Towards a Human Resource Development Ontology for Combining Competence Management and Technology-Enhanced Workplace Learning. In: Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006, p Paquette G. An ontology and a software framework for competency modeling and management. Educational Technology & Society 2007;10(3): Ng A, Hatala M., Ontology-based approach to formalization of competencies. In: Sicilia MA, editors. Competencies in organizational e-learning:concepts and tool. Hershey PA: Idea Group; p IEEE RCD. IEEE std IEEE standard for learning technology-data model for reusable competency definitions Available from: Byoungchol C, Yoonsoo L, Sua K, Jaehyuk C. Enhancing ontology-based educational content search service with competency. In: Proceedings of Eighth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologie. Santander, Cantabria, Spain, 2008, p Rogushina J, Gladun A. Ontology-based Competency Analyses in New Research Domains. Journal of Computing and Information Technology 2012; 20(4): Malzahn N, Ziebarth S, Hoppe, H. U. Semi-automatic creation and exploitation of competence ontologies for trend aware profiling, matching and planning. Knowledge Management & E-Learning 2013; 5(1): Sitthisak O, Gilbert L, Albert D. Adaptive Learning Using an Integration of Competence Model with Knowledge Space Theory. In: Proceedings of IIAI International Conference on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI AAI). Matsue, Japan, 2013, p