Современные информационные технологии и IT-образование (Mar 2023)
Application of a Force-Directed Graph Drawing Algorithm for the Analysis of Curricula of Educational Programs of Higher Education
Abstract
The work is devoted to the development of an approach to the analysis of curricula of educational programs of higher education in the context of the current federal state educational standards in terms of achieving the declared learning outcomes formulated in the form of a set of competencies. This approach may prove useful for developing automated tools for assessing the quality of educational programs, as well as their comparative analysis.We propose a model for representing the curriculum in the form of a simple weighted undirected graph based on the competence-based approach. We propose an approach to the visualization of the graph representation of the curriculum based on the use of a force-directed graph drawing algorithm, which ensures achieving maximum visibility. We propose an approach to determine the interdisciplinary links of educational units of the curriculum based on their total number of credits and the competencies they are involved in. The resulting visual representation of interdisciplinary connections helps to better understand the structure of the curriculum, identify disciplines with the maximum number of interdisciplinary connections, and also decompose the plan into clusters of the most interconnected disciplines. We propose options for defining integral characteristics of graph representations of curricula, based on which the curricula can be evaluated, as well as a comparative analysis of the corresponding educational programs can be performed. As examples, we consider the curricula for the of bachelor programs majoring in 09.03.01 "Computer Science and Computer Engineering" and 09.03.03 "Applied Computer Science ", implemented at the Institute of Space and Information Technology of Siberian Federal University.
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