Abstract
This chapter evaluates study program innovativeness based on an ontology-based measurement. It was supposed that topics of papers in leading journals in economics and management can be used as a “pattern of innovativeness” to reveal a connection between innovativeness of top innovative study programs of universities and the subjects from the research articles. The proposed method has been implemented by authors in R and Python languages to analyze the programs in economics and management at the top innovative universities. The proposed methodology has a much wider range of applications than the assessment of the innovation of study programs and can be useful for measuring innovative performance of different aspects of research activities or publications and for identification of the top innovative subjects.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays universities have a huge impact on the research and education development. This fact creates a necessity of continuous evaluation of higher education institutions activity in the area of fundamental research, teaching activity and knowledge transfer. The design and implementation of the ontology-based system for the evaluation of study program innovativeness and conducting the evaluation of two study programs from the point of view of their innovativeness is the main goal of this work. The ontology describing research and didactic areas existing within economics and management domain constitutes a core element of the proposed system. In the chapter this role will be played by the JEL classification system proposed by the American Economic Association.
During the first stage of the analysis, the innovativeness of every concept existing in the JEL classification system will be performed. It will be done with the use bibliometric measures calculated for papers annotated by JEL codes. Simultaneously with the calculation of bibliometric measures, keywords characteristic for every JEL code will be retrieved.
The second stage of the research will be focused on the analysis of university curricula. First, description of every course will be tokenized into phrases. Next, by the comparison of phrases taken from course description with keywords assigned to JEL concepts, the identification of topics discussed in syllabuses will be performed. Then the results of the first stage of analysis will be used for the evaluation of innovativeness of every topic existing in the course description.
As a final result the measure of innovativeness for a course description will be calculated.
The idea presented above will be implemented with the use of R programming language and will be used for analysis selected curricula of the top innovative programs.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Study Program: An educational process at the university aimed at developing special competencies among students in a particular specialty
Innovativeness: The level of relevance of process/ technology/ technique to innovation on the level of organization
Study Program Innovativeness: The accordance of a given study program with the most important trends in the world scientific literature
Knowledge Classification System: A taxonomy of knowledge presenting their main areas and subareas existing at lower levels
Ontology: A formal description of a given domain
Innovation: New or improved process/ technology not used before on the level of organization (for example, at the university)
Ontology-Based Text Analysis: An analysis of textual resources carried out by statistical and machine learning methods supported by domain knowledge defined as an ontology