Visual planner: beyond prerequisites, designing an interactive course planner for a 21st century flexible curriculum

In the 21st century knowledge economy there is a growing need for the types of creative thinkers who can bridge the engineering mindset with the creative mindset, combining multiple types of skills. New economies will need workers who have "diagonal" skill sets, who can develop systems and content as an integrative process. This requires a new type of training and curriculum. In the newly formed "Digital Culture" undergraduate program at ASU, we attempt to support new types curricula by structuring differently the way students move through courses. With a constantly shifting and changing curriculum, structuring course enrollment using class "prerequisites" leads to fixed and rigid pathways through the curriculum. Instead, Digital Culture structures course sequences based on the students accumulation of abstract "Proficiencies" which are collected by students as they complete courses, and which act as keys to unlock access to higher level course. As a student accumulates more and more of these proficiencies, they are increasingly able to unlock new courses. This system leads to more flexible and adaptive pathways through courses while ensuring that students are prepared for entrance into more advanced classes. It is however more complicated and requires that students strategically plan their route through the curriculum. In order to support this kind of strategic planning we have designed and deployed a course planning system where students can simulate various possible paths through the curriculum. In this paper, we show our design process in coming up with our "Digital Culture Visual Planner". This design process starts with a network analysis of how all the Digital Culture courses are interrelated by, visualizing the relationships between "proficiencies" and courses. A number of possible design directions result from this analysis. Finally we select a single design and refine it to be understandable, useful and usable by new undergraduate Digital Culture majors.