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Chapter 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9964-9.ch017
ABSTRACT
Producing or updating an academic program implies a signifcant efort: involving people, academic
units, knowledge elements, regulations, institutions, industry, etc. Such efort entails a complexity related
to the volume of elements involved, the diversity of the origins of contributions, the diversity of formats,
the representation of information, and the required granularity. Moreover, such efort is a common task
performed by humans who collaborate for long periods of time participating in frequent meetings in
order to achieve agreement. New educational approaches are heading to adaptive, fexible, ubiquitous,
asynchronous, collaborative, hyper-mediated, and personalized strategies based on modern Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT). We propose an approach for tailoring academic programs to
provide a practical and automated method to discover and organize milestones of knowledge through the
use of Complex Networks Analysis (CNA) techniques. Based on indicators from CNA, the act of tailoring
an academic program acquires meaning, structure and even body elements.
INTRODUCTION
As most people would agree, there is a continuous digital revolution due to advances in computational
capabilities, effective communication protocols, new understanding on data managing/mining/sharing
as well as distributed programming approaches; which have allowed achieving standardize new ways to
carry out common computer tasks, all over the world. As a consequence, societies nowadays have specific
demands on digital services, so significant amounts of knowledge elements have been digitalized. In
A Network Analysis Method for
Tailoring Academic Programs
Luis Casillas
University of Guadalajara, Mexico
Thanasis Daradoumis
University of the Aegean, Greece & Open University of Catalonia, Spain
Santi Caballe
Open University of Catalonia, Spain