Analyzing KTH's course syllabuses from a pedagogical perspective

Abstract: Course syllabuses are used by students and teachers in various pedagogical situations, which makes it important that the syllabuses are well-designed from a pedagogical perspective. It is therefore useful to classify the syllabuses and identify areas in need of improvement. However, due to the large number of syllabuses it is infeasible to perform the classification manually. The objective of this thesis is to analyze all current syllabuses at KTH according to how pedagogically useful they are. The analysis is enabled by defining what “pedagogically useful” means and by implementing a program which uses the definition to classify the syllabuses automatically. The results show that syllabuses fulfill most specifications to a rather high degree, but there is room for improvement in the intended learning outcomes by increasing the usage of constructive alignment and verbs belonging to the higher classes of Bloom’s taxonomy. The results also show that there are correlations of varying strength between how well the specifications are fulfilled and which school the course is given by, the cycle of the course and the number of credits. A remarkable result is that not all syllabuses comply with Swedish laws.