Quantitative analysis of curricula coherence using directed graphs

Abstract

This paper investigates methods for quantitatively examining the connectivity and knowledge flow in a university program considering courses and concepts included in the program. The proposed method is expected to be useful to aid program design and inventory, and for communicating what concepts a course may rely on at a given point in the program. As a first step, we represent the university program as a directed graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as directed edges. Then, we investigate the connectivity and the flow through the graph in order to gain insights into the structure of the program. We thus perform two investigations based on data collected from an engineering program at a Swedish university: a) how to represent (parts of) the university program as a graph (here called Directed Courses-Concepts Graph (DCCG)), and b) how to use graph theory tools to analyse the coherence and structure of the program.