Using TOSCA language to model personalized educational content: Introducing eduTOSCA

Students attending Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of Vocational Educational and Training (VET) are faced with a variety of complex decisions and procedures. To provide students with more sustained and personalized advising, many HEIs/VETs use academic advising systems and tools as a way to minimize costs and streamline their advising services. Furthermore, it is quite common for educational programs to include and combine educational content from different educational providers, while they are managed and executed on different platforms. Therefore, the ability to develop conceptual models for personalized learning based on educational content produced by heterogeneous educational service providers is a pressing need to address. A similar issue is confronted when deploying applications across diverse cloud computing platforms. A solution that is provided in these situations is the development of specialized languages for defining the topology and the orchestration of applications such as TOSCA, CAMP, Open-CSA, etc. In this paper, we propose to use similar conceptual models for modelling heterogeneous educational offerings toward personalized learning, which are presented along with the overall architecture of a system, named cc-coach, able to support these concepts. Further, this paper is a proposal for the standardization efforts needed for creating a multi-vendor educational ecosystem with diverse stakeholders, able to support personalized learning at various levels.