The complex tangle of rules, requirements, prerequisites, exceptions, and special circumstances which govern academia may feel like a forbidding jungle, but students and their advisors will have a new tool to help make sense of the system and to help chart the path to graduation.

Degree Navigator is becoming available, on a pilot basis, to students through Testudo (http://www.testudo.umd.edu/dnentry.html) and to faculty advisors through their departments. It presents the course offerings and course requirements of the different colleges and departments in a unique graphical display, and it allows individual students (or their advisors) to compare the courses already taken to the specific needs of the program, charting the progress toward a degree.

A Java-enabled web browser is required.

The display features archipelagos of colored "islands," representing different colleges, or departments, or groupings of courses within a single major. The islands have buttons representing specific courses. Clicking on one of the islands brings up expanded information about requirements or courses offered, while clicking on the course buttons leads to pop-up windows with details such as official title, credit hours, registration number, and course description.

There are a number of neat interactive features. For instance, in the window displaying all courses offered by a single department, holding the mouse over one of the buttons will light up, with different colors, all of the other courses related to that one as prerequisites, co-requisites, or exclusions, so that a student or advisor can easily follow the sequences and relationships visually, rather than having to compare course numbers in a printed catalog.

A plain, strictly textual display is also available for those who prefer not to navigate the colored islands and pop-up windows.

Advisors should appreciate the powerful processing features offered by Degree Navigator. For instance, the batch processing function will allow audits to be run in groups. Rather than having to key in many student numbers by hand, the advisor will be able to specify certain criteria (e.g. "Psychology majors with more than 60 credits who have completed requirements X, Y, and Z") and produce an audit of all students who meet them.

Another feature, exception processing, will enable an advisor to customize a program for a student. If there are personal requirements that can't be programmed to automatically pull appropriate courses into a student's audit--for instance, requirements based upon a student's uniquely designed focus or area of interest--the advisor may enter the particular requirements for that particular student into the system.

The system is still being implemented at the University of Maryland, and it may still contain errors or bugs. At present it is limited to undergraduates, and only the CORE requirements and certain majors are included. As more colleges enter their data and test their requirements, more majors will become available. It is hoped that most majors will be available by the end of the spring semester, although the system will continue to need updates and modifications as the academic catalog changes and as new rules and requirements are implemented.

The ability to quickly and easily audit a student's record should help save advisors time, enabling them to focus less on the drudgery of comparing and adding up numbers and more on actually helping students. The students, in turn, should be better informed about their needs, and they should find it easier to weigh their options and to plan a course of study, trying out different possibilities online and seeing the results laid out graphically.

Degree Navigator was produced and first implemented by Decision Academic Graphics (DAG), a company founded in 1994 by a group of professors at the University of Ottawa. It has since been adopted by many Canadian and American Universities, including the University of Calgary, Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, University of California, Davis, Ithaca College, and others.

For more information about Degree Navigator, or to give feedback, write to auditfolks@deans.umd.edu or call Linda Yokoi at 301.314.8269.

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