Rationalizing the development of course working programs based on their representation as information objects

Abstract

The article considers a course working program not only as a local regulatory document of a higher education institution, but also as a derived information object linked through a system of relationships with the higher education standard, the educational and professional program, the curriculum, and local regulations. The relevance of the study is associated with the development of internal and external quality assurance systems in higher education in Ukraine, the activities of the National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance, and the increasing requirements for consistency between educational programs and the documents governing their implementation. It is proposed to distinguish between data sources and rule sources and to classify the components of a course working program as externally defined, derived, and author-generated. Specific examples demonstrate that the traditional document-oriented approach to developing course working programs requires instructors to perform a considerable amount of non-creative operations, including searching, copying, repeated data entry, arithmetic calculations, synchronization of wording, and formatting. Such operations do not create pedagogical value, yet they require attention, increase the risk of errors, and reduce developers’ motivation. The transition to an information-oriented model is therefore substantiated, in which instructors focus primarily on the substantive content of the course, while regulatory and predefined data are retrieved from the relevant sources and validated by the system. Two prospective approaches to automation are proposed: a specialized web-based system governed by deterministic rules and an agent-based approach employing large language models with access to verified information sources.