Competency Mapping in Academic Environment: A Swarm Intelligence Approach

Background

Any academic institute imparting any kind of course has to undergo the task of load assignment/allotment to the concerned teachers or faculty members at the beginning of the academic year or semester. In technical institutions normally this is done by some senior faculty members and the Heads of department. But exactly there is no specified norm. For large departments the concerned heads spend a number of days to make such an allotment. And the basis of allotment is subjective assessment of HOD’s generally guided by heuristics & instincts. Past performance of the faculty members in terms of student feedback, student results, years of experience etc normally contribute to those assessments.

But what are the implications of such an allotment? Compliance with the regulations, satisfaction of the departmental needs, satisfaction of the faculty members and most importantly the right map between the subject, faculty & student. Now with the manual process of allotment, most of the time the objectives are not satisfied. Moreover as the strength of the department increases it’s difficult to find solutions which comply with most of the objectives. Hence a manual allotment often results in a sub-optimal solution which leads to resentment and demotivation among faculty members.

This necessitates a well-defined methodology which can generate optimal solutions taking care of all the objectives simultaneously. In this context the most important constructs are competency, competency mapping in academic scenario, optimal solutions & objective satisfaction. This narrows down to three broad aspects namely- Competency, Academics & Mutli-Objective optimal solutions. The mentioned aspects have been discussed in the next section with reference to relevant literature wherever necessary.