My team and I developed a live web prototype of UMSI / Discover, an interactive course exploration guide that links courses and skills to career outcomes built on the MAMP technology stack. As a learning analytics project, our primary data comes in the form of anonymized historic student registration information. However, we wanted to avoid using data to create prescriptive outcomes. Instead, we built an interface that uses the data in a descriptive manner, inviting users to explore the re-structured data that encourages their own career exploration.

In-Depth: Parallel Design / Development

Brainstorming for UMSI / Discover involved mapping high, process-level functions with the individual feature-level details. Ideating in this manner allowed us to consider front- and back- end design possibilities and constraints.

The final web prototype seams the front-end HTML / CSS / JS design to the mySQL database through PHP. The prototype demonstrates how the relationships between user-requested data are semantically and visually linked. In this case, related skills and courses are linked together.

In-Depth: Data Visualization

Career navigation through aggregate student academic histories

Prospective and new students have a common question: how do I select the best courses to achieve my desired goals? We answered this question by providing an interactive data exploration of past students' course selection with career outcomes.

Working with the university, we identified and compiled data on undergraduate majors, alumni jobs, and course information to provide anonymized and aggregated career pathways.

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In this view, students can select their respective undergradate focus and then see what careers alumni with a similar background have entered.

Selecting a career pathway then displays various anonymozed alumni course histories to browse.