Courses Content Classification Based on Wikipedia and CIP Taxonomy

Abstract

The amount of online courses and educational content available on the Internet is growing rapidly, leaving students with large and diverse number of choices for their areas of interest. The educational content is spread into diverse e-learning platforms, making its search and comparison even more challenging. Classifying educational content into a standardized set of academic disciplines or topics can improve its search, comparison and combination to better meet students’ inquiries. In this paper we make use of well-known techniques from Information Retrieval to map course descriptions into two common sets of topics, one manually created and well-controlled, i.e. CIP, and one collaboratively created, i.e. Wikipedia. We then analyze and compare the results to see how the size of the topic schemes and their associated data, such as textual descriptions, affect the accuracy of the end results.