At the request of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, HO&S directorate, Dialogic together with Oberon and KiTeS/CHEPS conduct a study into the content of institutional plans (IPs) of Dutch higher education institutions.
Goals
The purpose of this research is to make better use of the IPs and to gain insight into the trends and developments that can be identified from the plans and which themes the institutions focus on. These trends and developments are compared with the policy themes of the Ministry and contribute to the dialogue on higher education policy.
Summary
The analysis of the policy-defining documents is done in two ways. First we draw up a list of the topics that are central to the policy. To do this, we use existing analyses, such as the current strategic agenda of OCW, system reporting and future explorations, the expertise of the research team, and the IPs themselves. The method used for this is desk research. The list of topics thus obtained serves as input for the application of the AI-related analysis technique. With this technique, the results of the analyzes of the IPs are related in a consistent manner to the content of the policy-defining documents.
The institutional plans are analyzed in four steps. Step 1: mapping the topics. We start with a list of topics that we have drawn up ourselves. We then use AI to determine to what extent these topics appear in the IPs. Step 2: we let the computer itself, bottom-up, 'determine' what important topics are. This is an unsupervised approach in which a human researcher does not determine what topics are, but the AI tool itself constructs 'topics'. Step 3: the results of these analyzes are then interpreted by comparing them between institutions with different background characteristics. Step 4: an analysis of the use of photos and other visual imaging and profiling.
The results of the analyzes are discussed with stakeholders in a validation session.
Partners
The investigation started on February 1 and will be completed on July 1, 2024. The research is being conducted by a consortium of Dialogic, Kites/CHEPS (Harry de Boer and Frans Kaiser) and Oberon.
WHO'S WORKING ON THIS PROJECT
