Abstract:

STE(A)M education has been applied to enhance the understanding of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics and to enhance the teaching of STEM fields by utilizing common skills in the STEM and Arts disciplines (Allina, 2018). However, this integration requires a change of mindset and culture in educational community to adopt these new methodologies and structures (Milara et al., 2020).

Due to a lack of proper structuring of the educational materials available online, learning content and different concepts has become harder to access (Bucos et al., 2010). By creating properly-defined ontologies and afferent systems, searching for particular educational subjects can become an easier task for the application executing the queries (Nganji et al., 2022).

Project STEAMonEdu: Competence development of STE(A)M educators through online tools and communities designed an infrastructure for holistic, integrated change, by supporting professional development of educators in STE(A)M education through a competency-based perspective. This was achieved by identifying the necessary STE(A)M competences and skills required for STE(A)M teaching (STEAMcomp edu framework) and by providing targeted teacher training together with a set of supportive tools, including an online platform, STE(A)M body of knowledge, STE(A)M education good practices and policies and a STE(A)M readiness self-assessment tool (Kameas & Spyropoulou, 2020).

In this context, we designed an ontology for STE(A)M education by representing the knowledge needed by the STE(A)MonEdu project community regarding STE(A)M education. This ontology used by the project collaborative platform to provide semantically-enhanced access to a structured repository of all the important elements (polices, practices etc.) of the STEAMonEdu project. Our main objective was to create domain ontology to play an important role in representing STE(A)M education concepts and to assist specialized educational systems.

In this paper, an introduction regarding the usage of ontologies is presented along with the adopted methodology. Next, we illustrate the detailed description of the STE(A)M ontology. Finally, in order to evaluate the ontology, the competency questions used to validate it with the use of cases.

References:
[1] Allina, B. (2018). The development of STEAM educational policy to promote student creativity and social empowerment. Arts Education Policy Review, 119(2), 77–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2017.1296392
[2] Bucos, M., Dragulescu, B., & Veltan, M. (2010). Designing a semantic web ontology for e-learning in higher education. 2010 9th International Symposium on Electronics and Telecommunications, ISETC’10 - Conference Proceedings, 415–418. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISETC.2010.5679298
[3] Kameas, A., & Spyropoulou, N. (2020). Professional Development of Ste(a)M Educators With Online Tools and Communities. ICERI2020 Proceedings, 1(November), 9005–9009. https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2020.1999
[4] Milara, I. S., Pitkänen, K., Laru, J., & Iwata, M. (2020). STEAM in Oulu : Scaffolding the development of a Community of Practice for local educators around STEAM and digital fabrication. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 26, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2020.100197
[5] Nganji, J. T., Brayshaw, M., & Gordon, N. (2022). Flexible Ontology-Driven Educational Apps and Social Media for Learners with a Disability. 361–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05657-4_26

Keywords:

STEAM education, ontologies, online education.