Executive Summary: In recent years, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Ecuador have been subject to profound changes through demanding evaluation processes from the academic, administrative, and structural point of view. Regarding the academic evaluation, it is worth noting the exhaustive analysis that is carried out on the careers belonging to each IES.
The majors are governed by the Academic Regime Regulations (RRA)1, where each major has a study plan or curriculum that is divided into subjects and each subject has a structure, generally hierarchical of study content. As a result of the analysis made to the IES, the Higher Education control body (Senescyt) detected shortcomings (large number of degrees, disparity in terms of hours of similar careers, etc.) in terms of the structure of the careers, therefore Therefore, he proposed that all the careers enter a process of redesign or creation of new careers, causing the careers to be organized in networks at the national level to reconcile study plans. The Council of Higher Education (CES) as a ruler of Higher Education defined a nomenclature for the harmonization of qualifications that closes the range of titles that a career can deliver.
The current governing body for education in the country encourages the mobility of students and teachers in the country through the creation of cooperation networks. These networks not only define alliances in the creation of career designs and redesigns, they also include cooperation through through mobility and research. The disparity between careers from different HEIs that offer the same academic degree despite the fact that they are heterogeneous in terms of subject content and time spent for similar content (current credits), creates problems when student mobility occurs between HEIs. The mobility processes in the different HEIs become quite a challenge, so it is necessary to carry out a detailed analysis of the contents of the subjects to establish the degree of similarity between subjects and meet the minimums defined in the RRA. This analysis is a tedious and manual process that requires a lot of expertise both in the area of knowledge of the career and in the academic part, a process that can take time and is also prone to errors. Based on the problems described, this proposal will define methods that allow the extraction of course content from the universities participating in this project, which leads to the creation or extension of common models for the representation of courses and their content according to international standards. These models will allow the creation of a common repository of subjects, which in turn generates patterns using data mining techniques on the contents of the subjects. In addition, an application will be created with the ability to navigate through the contents, facilitating the IES the process in terms of detection and similarity between the subjects of the different careers in terms of content.
General Objective: Develop a model that allows solving the detection of similarities and behavior patterns, between academic contents of university careers, through the application of semantic technologies and data mining.
Specific objectives:
- Synthesize the current state of similar research.
- Analyze and extract data from the different data sources of subject content
- Define a common data model that represents the careers and their contents using a Semantic Web approach.
- Develop a platform that integrates subject data, the common model, and data mining algorithms.
- Evaluate the platform created through verification by an expert (race directors).
- Disseminate the results of the project through the generation of prototypes and the writing of scientific articles.
Participating Institutions:
UC, UDA, UTPL.
Participants:
Project Director Victor Hugo Saquicela Galarza
- Victor Hugo Saquicela Galarza
- Marcos Patricio Orellana Cordero
- Nelson Stone
Awarded budget: $41300
Project status: In progress.
