Course planning is a challenging problem due to its many complex dimensions, such as shifting course and degree requisites, selecting between alternative requisites, and conveying course catalog information to the user in a simple yet informative manner. This capstone project presents DegreeFlow—a full-stack web application—to address these challenges and and provide a visual, user-friendly solution to course planning. DegreeFlow allows users to look up course descriptions, visualize requisites as an interactive flow graph, and select between alternative requisites. DegreeFlow uses a normalized database structure to store course and degree data, converts that data into a flow graph, and provides an interactive visualization of the graph in the web browser. Twelve users, including students and faculty, provided qualitative feedback and rated the DegreeFlow on the System Usability Scale (SUS) after completing a set of predefined tasks. The users found searching and visualizing courses and their requisites intuitive, and provided recommendations for improving other features including alternative course selection. DegreeFlow averaged a 79.75 SUS score which is above the recommended threshold of 68.

Recommended Citation: Langevin A., Layman L., Stoker G., Pence T., (2023). DegreeFlow: A Visual Course Planning Tool. UNCW MS CSIS Proceedings. V. 17 , N. 1 .