Abstract:

Interactive curriculum visualization strategies are becoming an invaluable tool to facilitate the design of academic curricula in higher education institutions, and especially for engineering-related university communities. Through these tools, it is possible to explore the dynamic and (inter-)dependent relationships between existing courses beyond the initial Bachelor and Master's degree design. Both approaches are extremely important in competency-based curricula to shape the essential characteristics for training future engineering experts. For example, by displaying adjacency relations using various visualization methods and approaches, it is possible to identify courses whose competences are crucial for the whole Degree. In addition, weaknesses in students’ skills and competences could be easy identified and traced back to previous courses, whose contents need to be strengthened, either through the updating of their syllabus, activities or methodologies that helps students to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to cope with the new knowledge in subsequent courses. Thus, this would clearly allow to anticipate and mitigate these weaknesses before they show up in higher courses.

Therefore, this paper focuses on the extraction of static and dynamic dependencies between competences in the context of Spanish Engineering Degrees by defining specific questionnaires, as well as offering a visualisation methodology to illustrate the dependencies between courses and identify potential weaknesses. More specifically, the work methodology follows the following steps. First, various strategies to extract the existing dependencies between courses according to their basic and specific competences are identified, and a set of questionnaires are set up to identify possible collisions or problems between related courses that may bring certain knowledge deficiencies in higher courses. To orchestrate all this research, through a single and visual methodology, the next objective within this methodology corresponds to process and visualise such information through hierarchical edge grouping graphs using web technologies, allowing Degree coordinators to quickly detect problems in curricula. To complete the study, this paper further provides a proof of concept of this process through an analysis of the dependencies between courses in the areas of Computer Science and Telecommunications at the University of Malaga, Spain.

Keywords:

Curricula, Visualization, Competences, Engineering.