A Computer Assisted Decision Support System for Education Planning

The advances in technology are eliminating the demand for certain occupations and creating new opportunities. Thus, the universities, teachers, and students have to collaboratively work together to restructure their departments, course offerings, and course contents. Failure to realize the aforementioned initiatives may lead to a loss of quality and competitiveness. This study proposes a decision support system capable of maintaining the quality and competitiveness of the departments and the course offerings. The proposed system consists of three stages. The first stage is the data collection stage. At this stage, data are collected from the internet using web scraping methods. In the second stage, the collected data are turned into meaningful and processable information by natural language processing methods. In the third stage, the alternatives are ranked using multi-criteria decision-making methods. The proposed decision support system provides useful information to several educational stakeholders. First, universities are informed on which departments to create or close as well as the relevant course offerings. Second, information are provided to the teachers to create new courses or shape the course contents. Finally, students are better informed on how to go about choosing the universities, departments, courses, or career paths to pursue. The applicability and reliability of the proposed decision support system were experimentally proven through the use of computer engineering-related job postings and course contents of the universities in Turkey.