Concept Mapping Techniques (CMT) that extract and organize the most relevant information from experts' experience using statistics techniques and helps a working group to achieve conclusions
CMT applied to design of Electronic Engineering (EE) Degree at the University of Seville, Spain
Point map made with 98 items in Table 3 - the distance between points indicates the affinity of the two items / points
Table 3 is list of items selected in the brainstorming sessions
Points close to each other have high affinity in their competences
The point map is just a two dimensional projection of the distances derived from the total similarity matrices obtained from participants classification
Steps for CMT
Selecting and preparing the participants
Good knowledge of the field
Reality of the institution in which the curriculum is going to be implemented
10 to 20 participants recommended - 14 were selected for the design
Half were lecturers and half were old students with some professional relation with the department and currently working in electronic companies
Space / professional profiles - 3 were identified to be covered by EE
Digital Design
Digital Signal Processing
Applications - Design and Product design
Brainstorming session (items selection)
identify and list the relevant items for curriculum design according to professional profiles analysed
Theme of session - identification of the knowldge and skills deemed important as outcomes of a programme taking into account the Career space profiles
Structuring and rating items
After items were listed the relative importance and inter-item relationship is needed
A Likert scale where 1 indicates min contribution and 7 indicated max contribution to professional profile
all participants filled the questionaire individually rating 98 tems based on previous expereince and personal criteria
for inter item relationship classifying the items in several groups according to their affinity using their own criteria
number of groups and classification is based on participants own experience
each item only in one group
Representing items in a concept map (multidimensional scale and cluster anslysis)