Analysis of the Consistency of Prerequisites and Learning Outcomes of Educational Programme Courses by Using the Ontological Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The problem of the assessing the content of the program not the formal side of it is really important today. The authors attempt to present their view on contribution to managing that matter

 

The abstract is good, with all the general data presented clearly

 

The introduction is well-structured, not overwhelmed with references, presenting original text of the authors describing the background of the problem 

 

Almost 7 page long related work section is very thorough in terms of volume however if the idea is presenting 45 sources related to the research problem then this long (almost third of the body of the paper) section needs some more detailed analysis of this literature review in terms of outcomes - please provide more thinking on what you found out after analysing these works - probably classify them into some groups with particular features - provide some insights, give stronger ground of what is missing there (the authors provide somethng on it but too brief and general)  - otherwise this long review looks very descriptive - of course it shows sufficient theoretical background  - however the work done by the authors will be complete after some more reflection on this set of research. 

 

The methodology section is ok - brief and general

The 4th section is a detailed description of the proposed model

there are some questions:

 

I am ok with the proposed model however I didn't get why you started with the 4th semester and then went back to more general analysis of all the semesters and missing skills? probably I missed the point here but even if you need to start particularly from missing skills for the 4th semester please provide some explanations for that as going back to the more general overview of all the semsters (fig 16) after 4th semester  looks a little odd to me.

 

In general the section is good and provides some original insights and it promises the perspective in practical application of the proposed model - however please check the logic of the steps

 

The 5th section can be titled as results as no duscussion there

 

Conclusion is ok

It would be good to add limitations section

The reference list is sufficient and "fresh"

The language is ok, easy to follow however the style in general looks a little as translation from other language with little adaptation to real English and some too formal and awkward sentences there - the proofread with the native speaker will eliminate those issues. 

 

figure 12 comes twice in the text

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank You for Your work and comments. This will allow us to improve the quality of our work. We have fixed the indicated problems and errors, and we have taken into account all Your comments.

Detailed response in file.

Thank You again

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This article "Analysis of the Consistency of Prerequisites and Learning Outcomes of Educational Programme Courses by using the Ontological Approach" uses an ontological approach to develop the ontological model of the educational programme. The skills formed in the learning process are determined for each course, as well as the skills that are the input requirements for the student. The authors pay great attention to the semantic modelling of concepts describing the sequence and nesting of time intervals that are periods of learning. The model's major purpose is to analyse the consistency of the curriculum. The condition of the curriculum's consistency is met if all the skills required to start studying the courses of any semester were formed during the study of the courses of the previous semesters. The authors demonstrated the solution to this problem using a logical inference machine (reasoner) and query execution in SPARQL. The proposed approach can be used not only to analyse the consistency of a separate educational programme, but also for a comparative analysis of programmes among themselves. 

Recommendations and wishes:

* it is desirable to expand the analysis of world experience regarding the problem

* it is desirable to provide a comparative analysis of ontological models for use in the educational process

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank You for Your work and comments. This will allow us to improve the quality of our work and gives excellent ideas for the next works.

Detailed responses in the file

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors analyze the consistency of prerequisites and learning outcomes of educational programme courses by using ontological approach. Three results are carried out: 1) Analysis of scientific publications devoted to the use of semantic technologies for modelling educational programmes; 2) An ontological model of the educational programme; 3)SPARQL queries have been developed. The work is a relative good case study of ontological approach. However, the organization of manuscript has some serious problems. The manuscript is more like a project research report than a research paper. The manuscript presents many engineering results. It is necessary to strengthen the academic research methods and academic analysis results. Futhermore, there are some minor points:

(1) Some contents of introduction are not related to the topic of the manuscript. The main focus of introduction should concentrate on ontology or educational programme.

(2) The description of Figure 2 is not clear. Why is skill A the input for course 2 since skill A depends on skill C? 

(3) "skill N" in figure 2 should be "skill C"

(4) Contents from Line 485 to 487 are duplicated

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank You for Your work and comments. This will allow us to improve the quality of our work. We have fixed the indicated problems and errors. More detailed in the file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

According to the main text, authors have presented an ontological approach for educational Programme Courses with structural modeling.

There are some concerns that should be fixed and modified in the main text as follows:

1) Abstract should be precise. It must discuss the entire paper briefly.

2) Please exactly mention main contributions in Section 1.

3) There should be clear arguments in the literature section. Authors can discuss on main weaknesses of each work.

4) According to Figure 9, complete graph of the ontology is unclear. Please explain a bit graph theory conditions for this model.

5) Results and discussion Section should be imporved by adding some limitations and ocmparison aspects related to other case studies.

6) ADD/REVISE/UPDATE more recent references to your manuscript, to show that your research work is up to date, you're contributing to the development of the topic.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank You for Your work and comments. This will allow us to improve the quality of our work. We have fixed the indicated problems and errors.

Detailed responses in the file

Thnak you again

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks a lot for authors' response and improving the manuscript. However, the method should be strengthen and clarified. Moreover, most of current results are just screenshots from software. I think the results should be analyzed from method and some deep analyse about results should be given. Current manuscript more like a technical report of a project.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and give us possibility to improve the manuscript. We use your comments and strengthen the scientific sounds and the structure of our paper. We gave it a typical IMRaD structure, changing it from the technical report structure.

Thank you again.