Curriculum analysis of computer science departments by simplified, supervised LDA

Abstract

The design of appropriate curricula is one of the most important issues in higher educational institutions, and there are many features to be considered. In this paper, the two key features (“locality bias” and “combination of two simple factors”) were discovered by investigating the actual computer science (CS) curricula of the top-ranked universities on the basis of Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013), where the CS topics are classified into the 18 Knowledge Areas (KAs). We applied a machine learning method named simplified, supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (ssLDA) to the actual syllabi of the CS departments of the 47 top-ranked universities. ssLDA estimates the relative weights of the KAs of CS2013 in each syllabus. Then, each CS department was characterized as the averaged weights of the KAs over its included syllabi. We applied the three well-known data analysis methods (hierarchical cluster analysis, principle component analysis, and non-negative matrix factorization) to the averaged weights of each department and found the above two key features quantitatively and objectively.