Data sources

During this work, we explored diverse data sources, both open and closed. For example, we made extensive use of advertised job data to better understand skills and their relationship with course offerings. We used standards like ESCO, as shown in Figure 1, to create our database for skills descriptors.

Figure 1, ESCO data preparation

Regarding course data, we explore several open collections available on the Internet to understand the data ecosystem. However, for our experiments and demonstrators, we used two primary course data sources. WBS provided the first, and it consisted of courses with three main data fields, namely course title, course description and course learning goals.

Hochschule Schmalkalden provided the second-course data set. It consisted of more complex content because it included additional information such as credit number, course semester, instructor, etc. An example is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2, Hochschule Schmalkalden MS course data