Monitoring Services to Support Continuous Curriculum Engineering

Abstract

Continuous and rapid developments in science and technology have raised a challenge for compliance between the learning content provided by study programs and (1) the actual state of art in the domains the programs are addressing and (2) the actual needs of companies that will employ the graduates of these programs. To achieve such compliance continuously, the digitalization of learning content (curriculum) engineering could provide supporting tools that facilitate awareness of incompliance, which is the first step in introducing changes in the learning content. In this article we discuss how such awareness, regarding the needs of companies, can be supported by a service system that monitors the gap between educational demand and offer. The proposed service system provides possibilities for automatic, semi-automatic and manual analysis of texts representing the educational demand, versus the texts representing the educational offer. The implementation of the service system has been demonstrated, having been applied at university. The experiments showed that the system can provide valuable information for educational content development, but its maintenance and incorporation in study process management and curriculum engineering still require additional research.