METHODOLOGY OF ANALYSIS OF ELECTRONIC EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

Currently, 310 electronic courses on technical and humanitarian disciplines have been developed at the Faculty of Distance Learning (FDL) of the Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR), the basis of which is methodical provision in the form of educational content. The form of presentation of educational content has a significant impact on the quality of the education process. Good results of distance learning can be obtained when the training resource is carefully designed, highly informative, understandable, and readable. To date, there are many studies on the analysis of electronic content in various areas, including domestic ones. In most of them qualitative analysis criteria have been singled out, which are difficult to imagine as a universal means of evaluating texts, not to mention the automation of calculating such criteria. Quantitative same criteria are amenable to automation and most of them have specific scales of evaluation. The article considers the following criteria for the analysis of electronic learning content: information saturation; abstractness; readability; water content; keyword density. Information saturation is estimated by the number of new concepts introduced in the text that exist in an explicit and hidden form. The abstractness of the text is determined by the fraction of words in the text denoting abstract semantic objects, that is, those that are not accessible to immediate sensory perception. The readability index determines the minimum age of the reader, who will understand the text being analyzed. The water content of a text is the percentage of content in it of meaningless words that do not contain useful information (stop words). The density of the keyword is the square root of the number indicating the frequency of word usage in the text. The density of the most frequently used word is taken as the general density of the text. The main importance is that all of these criteria are sufficiently well researched to have a high accuracy of estimation. As additional parameters, the general FDL standards applied to the development of e-learning courses are adopted: compliance of the glossary; presence of visual representation of information; the content in the text of the links to the included illustrations, tables and formulas; the size of special blocks for highlighting important information. To obtain the final evaluation of the electronic training course, the parameters described above are reduced to a single scale, which makes them comparable. The article also offers an original method for analyzing the text of e-courses in distance learning systems, which allows creating recommendations for authors of educational and methodological complexes and eliminating some mistakes in their compilation that significantly affect the quality of electronic learning content.

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