Development of a curriculum analysis tool

A good curriculum is crucial for a successful university education. When developing a curriculum, topics, such as economics, natural science, informatics, etc. are set first, and course syllabi are written accordingly. However, the topics actually covered by the course syllabi are not guaranteed to be identical to the initially set topics. To find out if the actual topics covered by the developed course syllabi, we developed a method of systematically analyzing course syllabi that uses latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and Isomap. In this paper, we propose the web-based curriculum analysis tool with this method, and demonstrate an example of the way the tool is used for analyzing computer science curricula.