Reconciling Instructors' and Students' Course Overlap Perspectives via Linked Data Visualization

Abstract

Research on the use of modeling and mapping tools in curriculum management is thriving, often focusing on the perspectives of the faculty alone. However, scholarly works that also incorporate the students' curriculum concerns are rare. A recurring theme in students' curriculum concerns is the perceived overlap among courses, usually expressed at the level of common concepts across courses. This common 'concept' emphasis imposes a challenge for modelers, who often focus on the course-level comparisons because they usually lack tools with subcourse (concept)-level granularity. This article investigates how to model and represent curriculum information to help in reconciling the gap between instructors' and students' views of cross-course overlap. The proposed approach involves the design and development of a digital environment to model a curriculum via linked data through an ontology representing concept-level granularity, offer instructors aid in populating course content, and facilitate the visualization and manipulation of data. The visualization tools are designed to offer functions for perceived common concept overlap identification and rectification. This digital environment was deployed and evaluated in the context of a curriculum review process, in which 25 course instructors employed the visualization tools to address a perceived course overlap problem. The preliminary results demonstrate, first, the usefulness of the approach in reconciling the views of instructors and students regarding perceived course overlap. Second, the results highlight that the approach contributes to transforming course overlap from a fuzzy notion to a more concrete and actionable construct defined as either repetition or reinforcement. © 2008-2011 IEEE.