A new strategic project, TRACK, is using data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence to help students make good decisions to land their dream job. It’s also helping UTS design curriculum that anticipates the skills required in the workplace of the future. Associate Professor Kirsty Kitto explains.
Some UTS students know what they want to be, but don’t know what they need to study to get there. Others know what they’re interested in or good at, but can’t quite work out how to link subject choices to potential career outcomes.
How can we use data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence to help our students make sound decisions about which subjects to take and land their dream job in an increasingly uncertain job market?
How can we use data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence to help our students make sound decisions about which subjects to take and land their dream job in an increasingly uncertain job market?
But let’s also backtrack to the point where we’re designing the curriculum. Are we doing the best job we can to make their subject choices easy and intuitive? Do we indeed cover the skills that employers most desire? As educators, we also need better tools for conceiving and designing learning that anticipates the future workplace.
Tailored Recruitment Analytics and Curriculum Knowledge (TRACK) is a strategic data/analytics-powered project that’s building student and staff facing tools to help us solve these and many other questions.
TRACK’s tools and services will help deliver the UTS 2027 vision of personalised feedback and lifelong learning opportunities for all UTS students, as well as providing back-end data architectures that will help UTS to create efficient data pipelines (to e.g. curriculum data) that will help us to support our students and staff better.
TRACK’s tools and services will help deliver the UTS 2027 vision of personalised feedback and lifelong learning opportunities for all UTS students, as well as providing back-end data architectures that will help UTS to create efficient data pipelines (to e.g. curriculum data) that will help us to support our students and staff better.
Bringing together people from Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC), Student Services Unit (SSU), Information Technology Division (ITD) and the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning (IML), as well as academics and professional staff from a wide range of faculties and units, a variety of tools and services are being created.
For example, we’ll soon be launching a tool that extracts information from UTS subject outlines and course information, and tags this with skills and careers that those subjects/pathways are likely to teach (the Minimum Viable Product is available online to test drive). This information will eventually be presented in different ways to different user groups:
- Academics and professional staff are provided with a view that will help them design curriculum offerings more aligned with the career niches they are trying to fill.
- In the near future, students will be provided with a view that guides them on which subjects will prepare them best for a chosen career, or help them to explore possible career avenues given the skill set they currently have.
Feeding live data to these tools is a new Curriculum Application Programming Interface (API) service, that will also make it possible for people to extract curriculum information for use in other UTS tools. TRACK currently uses a dataset sourced from a company called Burning Glass, who have collected job advertisements from all over the world, and then carefully indexed them into a taxonomy (or more precisely, an ontology) of skills and jobs. This provides us with a wide variety of information about job trends, skill requirements for those jobs, geographical locations in which they occur etc., and a basis for comparing what we teach with what’s in demand.
To find out more and to test drive the TRACK MVP, check out the TRACK website or email CIC and we’ll add you to our contact list for updates.