Development of InCLOOM: A Competency Ontology Model

Educators consistently emphasize the imperative need to enhance the quality of students by focusing on the development of their competencies, aiming to produce competent students. While increasing emphasis on this aspect of education is good, it also results in a gap between competencies acquired by students and the requirement of specific fields of study. Most existing approaches are mostly suggested to adequate more on the students' self-development, while the alignment between field requirements, qualifications, and student learning outcome is explicitly addressed. This study aims to develop a competency ontology model called InCLOOM, designed to streamline the process of discovering students' competencies. This study employs an ontology-based conceptual model approach that encompasses various techniques for developing ontologies, including conceptualization, restructuring, and formalization, using the Methontology methodology as a guiding framework. The evaluation of InCLOOM was conducted using a task-based approach through the Protégé tool, ensuring accuracy and consistency. The findings suggest that InCLOOM is notable in capturing and organizing competencies to discover the student competencies and facilitate the continuous development of competencies while suggesting an improvement in addressing the disparity between university curricula and industry requirements, not just field of study. This paper only presents the development of InCLOOM, providing an overview of its overall development process.