A Web-Based System for Personalized Learning Path Tracking of Doctoral Students

High-quality training of doctoral students for valuable and thorough scientific research imposes high academic standards. The new academic generation of young scientists needs to be trained in creativity, critical thinking and autonomous intellectual conclusions. Doctoral students need to find suitable conditions for work, so that they can become independent researchers who at an early stage take responsibility for the scope, direction and progress of their projects. This defines the main purpose of doctoral education, which needs to be led at a high academic and methodical level. The highly acclaimed and well-popularized doctoral information system, developed at the University of Ruse, provides a wide array of possibilities for personalized learning path tracking. This enables the status of each doctoral student to be determined accurately and timely. The software allows for keeping detailed portfolios for each participant, and makes generation of various progress visualization tools, such as reports and graphs, effortless. Generating reports quickly and efficiently is an important benefit, compared to the conventional manual methods widely used in educational institutions. The paper explores the developed software system, and provides some sample analysis based on personal learning paths of doctoral students enrolled in the recent few years.