Abstract
Content addition to courses and its subsequent correct sequencing in a study plan or curricula design context determine the success (and, in some cases, the failure) of such study plan in the acquisition of knowledge by students. In this work, we propose a decision model to guide curricular design committees in the tasks of course selection and sequencing in higher education contexts using a novel methodology based on network analysis. In this work, the local and global properties stemming from complex network analysis tools are studied in detail to facilitate the design of the study plan and to ensure its coherence by detecting the communities within a graph, and the local and global centrality of the courses and their dependencies are analyzed, as well as the overlapping subgroups and the functions and different positions among them. The proposed methodology is applied to the study of a real case at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
Highlights
Many real world systems are subject to be modeled by the use of networks
Once the dependency structure of the University Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) mathematics degree has been modeled by means of a network, we present a network analysis to deal with the objectives pointed out in the introduction
Even if just some studies can be found that combine network analysis with tools for curricula design, the methodology proposed here provides a new vision of the structure and functionality of different curriculum designs
Summary
Many real world systems are subject to be modeled by the use of networks In these networks nodes represent the different elements of the system and edges stand for the interactions or relationships between them [1]. A key point is to devise measures suitable for quantifying the strategic importance of a node, an edge, a set of nodes, or a set of edges, with the goal of identifying the optimal functioning of the system represented by the network [2,3,4,5] Topological measures, such as different versions of vulnerability, efficiency, centrality, and clustering, can be used to quantify, compare, and rank different configurations for a specific system [2, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13].
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