Brainstorm ideas for what benefits that Gobbldygook can provide to the administration

hawkrives commented 8 years ago

Summary

what courses are people interested in

hawkrives commented 8 years ago

@drewvolz

It buys the administration intelligent enrollment prediction and offers them an opportunity to plan years-ahead for scheduling surprises (ex: CSCI every year during scheduling)

"An increase in interest for CSCI XYZ? Really? Okay, we'll open 2 sections.. but we can't? Dang it."

hawkrives commented 8 years ago

From our IR summary document:

Goal 1: For Students

Students are often concerned over the validity of their schedule, whether they are on the right track to graduate in a given amount of years, and if they satisfy the requirements for a given major or concentration. We believe that creating a schedule should be simple and intuitive. Students will be provided with the option to use their degree audit from St. Olaf, load a previously created schedule into the app, or search for courses within the app to populate their semesters. These three options allow for flexibility and choice during the schedule-making process.

As a supplement to an advisor, the student would receive fast initial feedback on graduation prospects for their selected schedules. This would allow for a closer eye to be kept on fluctuating areas of study, as well as provide an easy way to plan after a change in major or concentration. The feedback provided on the status on how far one has progressed within an area of study is paramount to the success of satisfying requirements.

A future counterpart goal is to securely tie in to Google Drive storage. Students could rely upon trustworthy data storage to backup their academic plans and progress, as well as share them with their advisor.

Goal 2: For Advisors

Advisors will be able to facilitate the schedule refinement process through a consistent interface for information exchange. We aim to replace the paper schedules that students and advisors keep stored away, so that their contents will be accessible within a website in a format that is easier to keep up to date.

Not every advisor can account for the requirements of a major outside of their typical advisory role. This application attempts to remove this limitation by surfacing information relevant to major fulfillment. If a student is curious as to what courses they should look into for the future, the advisor is able to glance at the student’s progress compared to the requirements of the major.

An advisor will be able to facilitate discussion with their advisees with an in-app real-time chat. The option to meet with advisees from essentially anywhere enhances the effectiveness of an advisor as they can make suggestions and changes directly to the student’s plan.

Goal 3: For Evaluators

Evaluators will be able to gain a better overview of the graduation status of a larger group in a short amount of time. This saves time in the costly task of evaluating student after student for the same set of rules and requirements.

At a glance, an evaluator could view any particular student’s progress, as well as the overall percentage of students who have satisfied their major and concentration requirements. This would aid in the initial evaluations of students when the time approaches for verifying whether individuals have satisfied the requirements.

hawkrives commented 8 years ago

Interest-based Schedule Generation

“I am interested in X, Y, and Z, and I have already planned out some courses that I must take—fill in my schedule with some other courses that I would find interesting.”

Analytics

The registrar could very easily gain insight into a handful of untapped areas involved throughout course scheduling and registration. The registrar could discover what the most popular searches were on their class and lab dataset, when students plan their schedules, and—what we believe to be most important—predicted enrollment/interest in courses before registration begins. With this type of insight, additional sections could be opened/closed in preparation for how students might behave during registration based upon their scheduling.

hawkrives commented 6 years ago

competitors:

degreeworks

https://www.ellucian.com/Software/Ellucian-Degree-Works/

guides:

conslusive systems

https://www.conclusivesystems.com/conclusive-systems-vs-the-big-guys/

DegreeWorks requires your staff to learn a proprietary programming language. Sure, there’s a point-and-click front end that they will demo for you. However, what you have to press them to find out is that the point-and-click interface is really just a superficial wrapper for their proprietary programming language, and that to get anything even slightly “complicated” done, you’ll have to drop into the programming language after all.

During any demo with Ellucian, be sure to ask: “At what point does your point-and-click interface fail to get the job done, forcing us into your programming language?”

And notice that online job listings for DegreeWorks clerks require them to know/learn the “Scribe” programming language, as well as SQL. And even with all of that, DegreeWorks still can’t codify your degree requirements as completely and accurately as Advisor.

hawkrives commented 5 years ago

I'm going to close this … since the administration has made loud noises about adopting Gobbldygook!

I'll keep a link to this locally, but I don't think we need to keep it open any longer.

hawkrives / gobbldygook