Creating Navigable Competency Maps from Learning Resource Corpora
Shyam Kumar V N, Chaitali Diwan, Srinath Srinivasa, Prasad Ram · 2020
This paper addresses the problem of organising large collections of learning resources in a way that is conducive to learners to get a semantic overview of the subject area. We propose mechanisms for automatic creation of a “competency map” that organises a learning space in terms of basic units of learning, each of which is called a competency. The competency map is organised as a 2-dimensional progression space. A progression space not only has a concept of distance between any pairs of competencies, but also a partial ordering that indicates progress made by a learner on reaching some competency. In addition to the idea of progression, a competency map needs to be organised such that, learning resources mapped onto the space can create coherent sequences of learning pathways that can be traversed on the space. To address such requirements, we introduce the concept of topic and resource “volumes” which are used as an indicator of the position of any competency in the progression space. Competency maps are created over several learning corpora, containing hand-curated learning pathways. These pathways were then used as ground truth to evaluate the soundness of the organisation of competencies.