Knowledge Graphs for Competency-Based Education

The project Knowledge Graphs for competency-based Education (KG4CBE) conducts educational data science research to establish competency-based instruction in higher-education programs. In this paper, we propose the design of a knowledge graph to examine the impact of instructional design on student-teacher interaction to facilitate complex learning. For this purpose, the knowledge graph will incorporate the components of an online introductory data science course, including educational materials and learning tasks created with the Four Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model. Furthermore, the knowledge graph will incorporate data recording the behaviors, interactions and assessments of participating students. To study the competency-based instruction process, the proposed knowledge graph must be scalable to the big data quantities common in educational settings. Therefore, the knowledge graph will be deployed as a tool with accompanying routines to acquire, simulate and load educational data. Furthermore, this tool will provide methods to interact with and visualize the stored information. As future research, we aim to evaluate the proposed knowledge graph in a large-scale educational design research study, to examine the impact of monitoring, forecasting and recommendations in complex learning settings.