Interactive Competency-Based Curriculum Visualizations to Map and Analyze an Academic Computing Program

Abstract

Higher education institutions usually show their curricula designs as static images. These images communicate the syllabus structure and elements to stakeholders. The curricula visualization area is growing interest in supporting description of competency-based curricula, curriculum analysis, and showing clear evidence of the relationship between the graduation profile and curriculum elements. This area also makes comparisons between curricula and international references; particularly in the case of computing programs, the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula. So far, the vast majority of curriculum visualizations are static. These visualizations do not show all concepts and relationships of the curriculum, especially in the case of a competency-based curriculum. The visualization of a competency-based curriculum is a great challenge. Having so many concepts makes visualization more difficult to understand. All in all, it is necessary to develop: 1) a set of interactive visualizations with a filtering mechanism to facilitate navigation, understand concepts, and enlighten curriculum relationships, 2) visualizations that will check the relationship between competencies of the graduation profile and curriculum elements, and 3) visualizations that allow comparison with international references such as the ACM/IEEE Computing Curriculum. This work presents a prototype with nine interactive visualizations for competency-based curriculum in computing programs, which attend the above list of three needs. This prototype tool was tested and validated during the curricular reform of academic programs of the School of Systems Engineering and Computing (EISC) in the Universidad del Valle.