An electronic engineering curriculum design based on concept-mapping techniques

Curriculum design is a concern in European Universities as they face the forthcoming European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This process can be eased by the use of scientific tools such as Concept-Mapping Techniques (CMT) that extract and organize the most relevant information from experts’ experience using statistics techniques, and helps a working group to achieve conclusions. This paper presents an empirical exploratory research study related to the application of the CMT to the design of the Electronic Engineering (EE) Degree at the University of Seville, Spain. Considering the Career-space conclusions as the initial point, the main relevant competences were identified in a brainstorming technique. These competences are organized according to their affinity using CMT, establishing and interpreting the main clusters and their relative importance. Finally, a reliability analysis of the concept maps was carried out verifying the correctness of the procedure and validating the results for the curricula adaptation.