Sustainable development in education – automating curriculum assessment

Abstract

The perpetual need for developing a sustainable economic environment places the education policies at the foundation of social adaptability. Creating and maintaining curriculum content that meets the demands of a continuously changing society, and the challenges that such a rapid evolution put on the labour market, is one of the top priorities for any education system and institution involved in education at any level. This paper proposes a cognitive computing solution for assessing, in a programmatic manner, large corpora of curriculum content created by teachers from lower secondary education environment for Informatics instruction in Romanian schools. The result of this initiative at the national level is corpora of curricular content that must be evaluated to verify the degree to which the material meets the requirements of the national curriculum. We addressed this crucial yet tedious process by designing and implementing a solution for automating curriculum assessment through cognitive computing. The paper outlines a sustainable framework to evaluate curriculum content in an automated fashion, and for providing critical feedback timely to both content creators, and to policy makers responsible for creating economically viable and future adaptable education strategies. First published online 05 July 2021

Keywords

• education for sustainable development
• curriculum content assessment automation
• cognitive computing
• cluster analysis
• gis technologies