How the University Portal Inspired Changes in the Academic Assessment Culture

TL;DR

This study examines how a semantic university portal in Ukraine has transformed academic assessment culture by fostering personalized, value-driven information retrieval and collaborative decision-making over four years.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of a semantic IR ecosystem on changing academic assessment practices and collective mindset in higher education.

Findings

The portal facilitated personalized IR services based on user values.

It contributed to a shift in academic assessment culture.

Four years of active use showed significant social impact.

Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) is known facilitator of changes ongoing in human society and vice versa. This is due to the fact that IR is a key component of the digital ecosystems, where both information providers and information consumers collaboratively address their problems with the use of technologies. Organization and design of such ecosystems drives particular social impact for all the players involved. In this paper, we study the impact made by a particular IR ecosystem (semantic portal) used for management of academic information resources and processes within the Ukrainian higher education. We show how this portal is changing a collective mindset of the academic community of its users. We argue that such impact becomes possible due to specific organization of the ecosystem, where all the information resources, IR services and related analytics (search, assessment, ranking, etc.) and IR users inhabit the same semantic space under umbrella of the corresponding ontologies. Personal values and preferences of the users configure on-the-fly the corresponding IR analytics and enable personalized value-driven IR services, making everyone feel involved into the organizational decision-making processes. Four years of active use of this portal in university environment has been reported and related impact is evaluated in this study.