Completeness in Learning Resources: A Business Process Perspective

Abstract

The advancement of information and communication technologies has facilitated access to learning resources, thereby transforming the manner in which knowledge is acquired both within the context of formal education and within the context of job training. However, one of the problems that accompanies the learning resources is the lack of methods to assess their quality so that users may select the best ones in order to achieve the learning objectives. One of the attributes that has been extensively mentioned in the literature as important to achieve learning objectives is completeness, which refers to how much information a resource must contain in order to support a learning objective. However, there are not recognized methods to measure completeness. This work objective is to develop a method and a system for evaluating completeness of learning resources employed in the context of workplace training. It is crucial to ensure the completeness of a resource in order to determine whether it contains the required information to achieve the learning objective for an organization. The method for completeness evaluation comprises the formal definition of a business process, the identification of its products, and a comparison of its products with the content of the learning resources, using natural language processing and six similarity measures. Forty learning resources were assessed for completeness; the results show that a considerable number of the evaluated learning resources exhibit significant deficiencies in terms of completeness. The method is a first approach to measure completeness from a business process, and some limitations were identified. It assumes equal importance among all content elements in a resource; it penalizes extensive resources such as books, and depends heavily on well-documented business processes. Furthermore, completeness should be considered alongside other quality attributes to ensure a more comprehensive evaluation of learning resources.