A Strategy to Enhance Computer Science Teaching Material Using Topic Modelling: Towards Overcoming The Gap Between College And Workplace Skills

Computer Science teaching materials are biased towards concepts and theoretical aspects. One may consider it difficult to relate concepts to concrete problems. Consequently, it increases the chances of a student not recognizing the relevance of the subject, becoming unmotivated and unprepared to solve practical problems or coping with workplace needs after college. This paper shows the use of social media data as an alternative to minimize the skill gap between what the student learns in college and the skills required in the workplace. The proposed strategy consists of extracting topics from Stack Overflow questions to identify concepts generally unknown or misunderstood and concepts that their practical application represents a challenge. The concepts covered in Stack Overflow questions provide strong cues about how professors and instructors can improve teaching material with useful content for their students, as well as increase their motivation - since the teaching material becomes clearly related to practical issues in Computer Science. We show, by an example, how to use the proposed strategy to improve teaching material from the generated topics. Also, we demonstrate that the application of topic modeling in Stack Overflow content is promising as a professor support tool to enhance teaching material relevance in Computer Science courses and diminish the college-workplace skill gap.