Ukrainian Journal of Educational Studies and Information Technology (Dec 2017)
Expert System for the Analysis of Qualification Standards in European Countries
Abstract
National standards of education in the Bologna Process countries differ both in the structural and in the substantive parts of the documents. Automation of comparison of qualification levels of different countries allows to provide more effective interaction of university centers in the field of educational services and the labor market. In this article, using the method of Professor V. Osadchy, an expert system of ES for the comparative analysis of the qualification levels of the standards of European countries on the descriptor «Knowledge» was developed. The code of the program is based on the Windows Forms technology in the Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 software development environment. The algorithm for comparing the levels related to different standards is implemented in the form of the following operations: First step. In the studied subject area Q, which contains a textual description of the qualification levels of education, a universal set V is created from elementary semantic units vi with the indication of the measure of each element μ(vi). The semantic content of vi is presented in text form in such a way that the expert has the opportunity to characterize any level of the standard Pu with the help of a subset of Ru from the elements. The second step. From the list of participants in the Bologna Process, countries and their qualification levels are selected to carry out the comparison. The third step. Experts fill in the tables with an estimate of the probability of occurrence of elementary semantic units vi in the subset Ru for the chosen qualification level. The fourth step. We calculate the measures of the subset μ(Ru) and display the results of calculations on the display screen. The use of this algorithm made it possible to create a convenient software product for conducting a comparative analysis of the national standards of education in European countries. Efficiency tests were carried out in various modes of filling the initial forms. Using the example of comparing the NQFU standards and the EQF standard for the «Knowledge» descriptor, the reliability of the functioning of all forms of the program, the stability of the output of information with respect to unauthorized actions of experts, and the convenience provided to the user by the interface when filling out the tables are shown. It is shown that the zero level of the NQFU standard is consistent with the first level of the EQF standard, and the first, second and third levels of the NQFU standard are close, respectively, to the second, third and fourth levels of the EQF standard.