An Analysis on Crisis of Local Universities and Overcoming Measures: Focused on the Analysis of Convergence Education Trends Based on Social Big Data

Abstract

(Purpose) The crisis of local colleges is combined with various causes and phenomena such as depopulation, local extinction, decrease of enrollment resources, centralization of capital area, and declined competition rate of enrollment in natural sciences & engineering departments in local colleges. Facing the great transformation(crisis) of social structure by population change, and digital transformation(crisis), we should make a breakthrough “for the former crisis in the latter opportunity”, which is “convergence education”. In order to effectively support convergence education, it would be necessary to examine the trend of convergence education so far. (Design/methodology/approach) This study collected/analyzed data of convergence education by using the social big data. As the channels for data collection to analyze the trend of convergence education, this study selected Naver(whole web document, blog, news, cafe, knowledge-iN, academic info), Daum(web document, blog, news, cafe), and Google(web document, news, facebook), and also chose ‘convergence education’ as a keyword for data search. The period of data analysis was from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2022(Use of TEXTOM). Based on the results of the analysis, this study presented the measures for vitalizing convergence education to cope with the crisis of local universities. (Findings) Currently, the convergence education focuses on the establishment of curriculum in the unit of college, and the office of education is performing activities to build up the basis of convergence education in the level of elementary & secondary education. The importance of academic field was shown in the order of ‘science’, ‘arts’, ‘technology’, ‘industry’, ‘math’, ‘information’, and ‘design’. The network analysis shows that the current convergence education is converged with arts and humanities such as art and culture based on the natural science-type convergence talent education, focusing on the goal of cultivating the future talent based on science. (Research implications or Originality) The following policies were proposed as a policy alternative to revitalizing convergence education. (1)Direction of convergence education for local colleges, (2)Relief of barrier between majors, (3)Combination of digital transformation technology with humanities/social sciences, (4)Improvement of convergence education into friendly curriculum. Intensifying the understanding of a single academic field is not good enough to cope with the complexity of modern society, expertise of knowledge, and diversified social functions of college. It would be needed to avoid the exclusive operation of traditional studies, and also to form the system of in-depth understanding of problems handled in many academic fields. The social consensus of convergence education should be widely spreading in college community.