The primary improvements are in the areas of:
- User Management. If there are multiple people from your organization using this application, you can now combine them within a single organizational structure that may contain sub-organizations. Thus, you can now create and organize users within an organizational structure that matches your institution, e.g., university -> colleges -> departments. You can also create an organization to house curricular studies involving other institutions, etc.
- Support for Curricula and Degree Plans. A clearer distinction is now made between a curriculum, and the different degree plans that can be created to satisfy a curriculum. Specifically, a curriculum is the set of courses in a degree program, along with the prerequisite arrangements between these courses. A degree plan is a term-by-term arrangement of the courses in a curriculum. Conceivably you can now create a different degree plan for every student pursing a particular degree.
- Metrics. Additional metrics have been created that allow you to analyze both curricula and degree plans in order to support data-informed decisions. These metrics are computed using a curricular analytics statistical toolbox, and to support transparency of our methods, the toolbox is available to institutional researchers as open source software.
- Visualization. An improved user interface is now available for viewing and editing curricula and degree plans, and for viewing the metrics associated with curricular and degree plans.
- Extensions. In the future we will be providing a number of extensions that will take advantage of new the infrastructure that now exists behind this web application. These will include:
- The ability to more easily compare and contrast curricula and degree plans.
- The ability to create degree plans optimized around particular requirements or student characteristics. Advisors will also be able to easily create degree plans by merging two curricula, e.g., a major and some minor, a double major, a 2-year to 4-year transfer plan, etc. (Note: because this feature will use a commercial optimization package, there will be a small fee associated with this service.)
- The ability to perform what-if analyses, e.g., “What effect would improving the pass rate in this gateway course by 5% have on our 6-year graduate rate?” (Note: because these analyses require significant computational resources, there will be a small fee associated with this service.)
If you would like to serve as a beta-tester for any of these services, please send a request using the subject “Tester” to: support@CurricularAnalytics.org.