Authors:
Laia Blasco-Soplón
;
Josep Grau-Valldosera
and
Julià Minguillón
Affiliation:
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Keyword(s):
Enrollment, Dropping Out, Chord Diagrams, Radial Visualization, Distance Education, Higher Education.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Computer-Supported Education
;
e-Learning
;
e-Learning Applications and Computer Graphics
;
Graphical Interfaces
;
Interactive Environments
Abstract:
Distance and online universities have usually more flexible academic requirements than brick-and-mortar ones, so students do not uniformly advance within the programme they enroll into as they are supposed to. Furthermore, due to their intrinsic nature, distance students need additional support for deciding which subjects they will take every semester. On the other hand, teachers have usually no idea about what other subjects are taking the students enrolled in their subjects. This paper proposes the use of chord diagrams for visualizing the relationships between pairs of subjects taken by students, with the aim of providing both university managers and students with a clear picture of possible bottlenecks, that is, combinations of subjects that might affect students’ performance. Chord diagrams can be used to analyze intra-semester data (subjects taken simultaneously) and inter-semester data (sequences of subjects taken by students) and provide a fast overview of what is happening w
ithin a given programme at subject level. Furthermore, it is possible to interact with chord diagrams in order to filter and obtain additional subject details if desired.
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