The goal of the interdisciplinary seminar series Computation & Data at HSU is to bring together researchers and foster exchange on the development of algorithms, methods and software. The seminar series is typically scheduled for the last Wednesday every month, 16:00-17:00, with 1 presentation per hybrid session (digital and at HSU). Immediately after the seminar series, the HPC Café take place.
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Adult and continuing education differs from other areas of education in its high degree of heterogeneity and deregulation. This concerns all aspects and subject areas of this field of education: teachers, learners, providers, and especially the topics, contents, target groups, methods, and formats of the learning opportunities. Since learning opportunities rarely follow curriculum guidelines and are mostly adapted to demand at short notice by commercial providers, they can hardly be recorded using standardized methods. The result is a systematic gap in standardized data on continuing education opportunities. The systematic lack of data in this area has led to the utilisation of fundamentally different data sources than standardised surveys for research purposes. Of particular interest are course databases that contain non-standardised announcement texts for course offerings. These texts contain the information that customers need to decide whether or not to participate: content, learning objectives, intended use, target group, method, formats, location and time.
The combination of new methods of natural language processing with increasingly affordable technical solutions enables the use of a very large scale of these non-standardised text bases for empirical adult education research. The contribution presents research results on text classification and topic modelling using LLM and trained transformer models and highlights further possible applications.
