2015 AJouhri IEEE

Evaluation of concepts is a necessary step in evaluation of university program of study
- Content of course is readily available on the internet
- Understanding natural language course descriptions requires manual inspection and implicit knowledge of the subject area
- Holistic analysis requires evaluation of prerequisite structure within a department
  - Conceptual overlap between courses in a prerequisite chain
Study applies existing topic modeling techniques to sets of course descriptions extracted from publicly available university course catalogs
- Inference is unsupervised and generated topics without the need for manual inspection
Web based application for inferred topic presentation (http://edmine.cs.gmu.edu/)
- View the inferred topics for a course
- quickly compare departments by their topic composition
- visually analyze conceptual overlap in departmental prerequisite structures