Are we on the same learning curve: Visualization of Semantic Similarity of Course Objectives
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for program managers in educational institutions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing semantic analysis methods.
The research tackled the problem of comparing course objectives for transfer agreements by developing visual tools for semantic analysis, achieving intermediate results in extracting, analyzing, and visualizing data from course descriptions.
The course description provided by instructors is an important piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course description is the Learning Outcomes section. The contents of this section are used by program managers who are tasked to compare and match two different courses during the development of Transfer Agreements between different institutions. This research introduces the development of visual tools for understanding the two different courses and making comparisons. We designed methods to extract the text from a course description document, developed an algorithm to perform semantic analysis, and displayed the results in a web interface. We are able to achieve the intermediate results of the research which includes extracting, analyzing and visualizing the data.