Interdisciplinary programmes have become common in universities and research groups’ curricula. This study conducted a network analysis on a Korean university’s undergraduate curriculum and used several visualisation tools to assess keywords across courses and departments, revealing epistemological distances between the courses/departments and their concepts of study. This data-driven methodology defined the characteristics of close or neighbouring departments, making it possible to implement narrow interdisciplinarity through common subjects within the courses. Interestingly, a further projected network could determine the implicit relations between departments that are not considered close, which would make it possible to implement a wide interdisciplinary curriculum. The data-driven network analysis conducted in this study contributes to searching for new programmes for specific levels of interdisciplinarity on an empirical basis.

Educational mapping is the process of analyzing an educational system to identify entities, relationships and attributes. This paper proposes a network modeling approach to educational mapping. Current mapping processes in education typically represent data in forms that do not support scalable learning analytics. For example, a curriculum map is usually a table, where relationships among curricular elements are represented implicitly in the rows of the table. The proposed network modeling approach overcomes this limitation through explicit modeling of these relationships in a graph structure, which in turn unlocks the ability to perform scalable analyses on the dataset. The paper presents network models for educational use cases, with concrete examples in curriculum mapping, accreditation mapping and concept mapping. Illustrative examples demonstrate how the formal modeling approach enables visualization and learning analytics. The analysis provides insight into learning pathways, supporting design of adaptive learning systems. It also permits gap analysis of curriculum coverage, supporting student advising, student degree planning and curricular design at scales ranging from an entire institution to an individual course.