A computer assisted decision support system for education planning

One of the most important factors in shaping the future of the human being is education. The most basic elements of the education process are learners, teachers and educational environment. The developments in technology and informatics have affected reasonably these three elements. These developments are eliminating the demand for certain occupations and create new occupational opportunities. Educational environments such as schools, colleges, universities set their own curriculum and course contents; teachers and learners update their teaching and learning methods and preferences in line with these developments and using these developments. Otherwise, these elements are condemned to lose their quality and competitiveness. Thus, new tools are needed to make the necessary updates. In this study, information management system that can meet these needs has been proposed. The proposed system consists of three stages. The first stage is the data collection stage. At this stage, data is collected from the internet using web scraping methods. In the second stage, the collected data are turned into meaningful and processable information by natural language processing methods. In the third stage, preferences are identified by using computerized decision support systems. Thanks to the proposed system: educational institutions is informed about which new departments should be opened for occupational groups, which departments should be closed due to being unnecessary, which courses should be opened or closed for which occupation; teachers are assisted to decide how to shape the content and method of teaching; learners will be able to decide more easily choose which environment, department, profession and courses. In order to test the proposed system, an application was realized for the computer engineering sector. For this purpose, data were gathered from the various job posting sites, about the expectations of the sector from the employees. In addition, the course contents of the relevant departments of the universities were collected. In order to match supply and demand, universities and courses were ranked using ELECTRE, TOPSIS and VIKOR methods and required updates were shown. The fact that the rankings are similar to the results of OSYM and URAP, which provide ranking according to different criteria, shows the applicability and reliability of the proposed method.