Align My Curriculum: A Framework to Bridge the Gap between Acquired University Curriculum and Required Market Skills

Abstract

With the advancement of technology, academics and curriculum developers are always under pressure to provide students with skills that match the market’s requirements. A systematic and continuous examination of the market is needed, to stay up to date with the required skills, and then to update the curriculum to train the students with required market skills. In this article, we present a framework referred to as Align My Curriculum (AMC). The AMC framework aims to facilitate alignment between acquired university curriculum outcomes and required market skills. It can be used to classify, compare and visualize the data of a university curriculum and job vacancies in the market. The presented framework benefits academics and curriculum developers by improving the courses and therefore bridging the skills gap. Stakeholders from both academia and industry can gain insights into the predominant required and acquired skills. In addition, it may be useful for analysts, students, and job applicants. This article describes the architecture, implementation and experimental results, with visual analysis to help decision and policy-makers.

Framework for identification of curriculum gaps: A systematic approach

“…Prior research has widely focused on the history of curriculum theory and gap (Huenecke, 1982;Klein, 1992;Tyler, 1977), gap analysis approach (Davis et al, 2002;Nordstrom & Shwewood, 1997;Winer, 1998), curriculum theory and practice gap (Harvey et al, 1997;Klein, 1992), the academician-practitioner gap on theory and application (Cavicchi et al, 2014;Howard & Warwick, 2013;Klein, 1992;Pratama, 2015;Repsold & Hemais, 2017), desirable graduate attributes and employability skills (Fallows & Steven, 2000;Gammie et al, 2002;Harvey et al, 1997), systematic approach for curriculum design using CDIO approach (Azasu & Gibler, 2016;Crawley, 2001;Malmqvist et al, 2016), and bridging the curricula-industry skills gap (Almaleh et al, 2019;Ayofe & Ajetola, 2009;Valdes et al, 2017).…”

“…he curriculum gap is broadly described as the disparity between the intended and implemented course (Atibuni, 2020). With the advancement in the business landscape, academicians and curriculum developers are constantly faced with matching industry expectations of graduates to curriculum development and delivery (Almaleh et al, 2019). Due to the program constraints, students are least influenced by the newly introduced courses aiming at the curriculum gaps (Gannod et al, 2005).…”

Designing Dissemination and Validation of a Framework for Teaching Cloud Fundamentals

“…This automated test reduced the bias and subjectivity in curriculum validation. Almaleh et al [15] presented a framework based on a classification model for analysing data on curricula and job websites, and were able to create visualisations of gaps between courses and job datasets.…”

Development of a Job Advertisement Analysis for Assessing Data Science Competencies

“…A suitable approach is the job advertisement analysis approach, which makes it possible to continuously record new competency requirements of the workforce. Job advertisement analysis approaches are gaining attention (Almaleh et al 2019;Boselli et al 2018;Khaouja et al 2019;Khobreh et al 2015;Lima, Bakhshi, et al 2018;Wowczko 2015;Zhao et al 2015) especially in the field of analyzing data science competencies (Dadzie et al 2018;Djumalieva, Lima, Sleeman, et al 2018;Debortoli, Müller, and Brocke 2014;Murawski and Bick 2017;E. Sibarani et al 2020;Silveira et al 2020;Shirani 2016).…”