Competency analytics tool: Analyzing curriculum using course competencies

Abstract

The applications of learning outcomes and competency frameworks have brought better clarity to engineering programs in many universities. Several frameworks have been proposed to integrate outcomes and competencies into course design, delivery and assessment. However, in many cases, competencies are course-specific and their overall impact on the curriculum design is unknown. Such impact analysis is important for analysing, discovering gaps and improving the curriculum design. Unfortunately, manual analysis is a painstaking process due to large amounts of competencies across the curriculum. In this paper, we propose an automated method to analyse the competencies and discover their impact on the overall curriculum design. We provide a principled methodology for discovering the impact of courses’ competencies using Bloom’s Taxonomy, Dreyfus’ model and the learning outcomes framework. We developed the Curriculum Analytics Tool (CAT) which generates the competency scores for the entire curriculum across two dimensions; Cognitive levels and Progression levels. We use the CAT to analyse the competencies of an undergraduate Information Systems Management core curriculum program. Using 14 courses and the corresponding 578 competencies, this paper shows how our method enables us to perform in-depth analysis on the curriculum by discovering the cognition and progression statistics. We further apply the tool for recommending competencies when launching new courses.