A Network Analysis Method for Tailoring Academic Programs

Abstract

Producing or updating an academic program implies a significant effort: involving people, academic units, knowledge elements, regulations, institutions, industry, etc. Such effort entails a complexity related to the volume of elements involved, the diversity of the origins of contributions, the diversity of formats, the representation of information, and the required granularity. Moreover, such effort is a common task performed by humans who collaborate for long periods of time participating in frequent meetings in order to achieve agreement. New educational approaches are heading to adaptive, flexible, ubiquitous, asynchronous, collaborative, hyper-mediated, and personalized strategies based on modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We propose an approach for tailoring academic programs to provide a practical and automated method to discover and organize milestones of knowledge through the use of Complex Networks Analysis (CNA) techniques. Based on indicators from CNA, the act of tailoring an academic program acquires meaning, structure and even body elements.