Validating the ontology-driven reference model for the vocational ICT curriculum development

Abstract

In the globally standardized domain of ICT, the vocational education curricula have to balance the requirements of fast-evolving international standards with unique local cultural traditions and socio-economic needs. This paper summarizes the results of a case study that tackled this challenge by developing and validating a reference model for ontology-driven curriculum development in the context of vocational ICT education in developing countries a case study about Afghanistan. We have demonstrated that even in the most challenging socio-economic and cultural context, semantic technologies have potential to represent, organize, formalize and standardize the knowledge in ICT domain so that it can be built, shared and reused in the curriculum process by different stakeholders like teachers, employers, alumni and deans. The final stage of our iterative design-based research focuses on development and validation of Ontology-Driven Curriculum (ODC) reference model based on results of our previous research.