Abstract
Cross field learning and multi-professions have become a trend in 21th century. People are gradually expected to possess knowledge and skills across different fields in order to communicate, cooperate, and solve complex problems. In universities, institutes provide learning resources, such as study programs and courses. However, during the process of making career plan and information seeking, the resources and knowledge networks need students who have motivations to explore disciplines beyond their current disciplines with additional efforts to explore and discover. In the past, though people payed attention on how to assist cross-field learning for students, it lacked the discussion about how to utilize information systems to facilitate this task in students' scenarios. This study aims to investigate the needs and the problems of students as target users of the service system, and develop an exploration prototype system as a minimum viable product to test the market. We also intend to make the value out of data from the institutional repository storing explicit knowledge. To achieve the goals and fulfil the needs of people, we take the framework of design science in the research. The exploration system, called Research Area Exploration System (RAES) applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to make connections across institutes and research areas. At the end, we evaluate the performance with quantitative and qualitative methods by comparing RAES with the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation System (eTDS) used by the library. The results show that RAES uniquely benefits users in different aspects from the existing eTDS, which indicates that RAES marginally contributes to facilitating students to cross disciplines in their studies.