Computer Aided Curriculum Planning and Scheduling (CACPS) System  

   People: Drs. Xiang Fu, Boris Peltsverger, Cathy L. Rozmus
   Contact: Dr. Xiang Fu (xfu@canes.gsw.edu)
    
         Click here for the presentation (PPT, 1.05 MB) about the tool at 2005 SACS-COC.
         Introduction: One of the greatest challenges faced by the U.S. higher education is the diversity of student body. Each individual student may have a rather different academic goal and background, which leads to a diversified curriculum and graduation plan. On the other hand, due to the flow of faculty, budget cuts, and the rapid development of technology, multi-year course offering plans of many universities are changing frequently. We developed the Computer Aided Curriculum Planning and Scheduling (CACPS) System to overcome the aforementioned challenges and achieve the following goals:

  • Help students establish a long term academic plan early, and monitor their academic progress effectively.

  • Provide an environment to integrate information for advisors and improve the efficiency of advising services.

  • Collect necessary information for administrators to make decisions on course offering and scheduling such that educational resource utilization can be optimized.

         One nice feature of the tool is that most of the information needed by the tool (e.g., student transcripts, course catalog) are automatically extracted from a university's website. Currently one working demo version of the tool is freely available for download. The demo version works for the Computer Science major of GSW, though it can be extended to satisfy the needs of other schools/departments of GSW and other higher education institutions. The system needs to read course catalog pages and student transcripts hosted on the GSW R.A.I.N. system (the SunGard SCT system).  Data adaptors can be developed for other student management systems.

         Tool Download and Installation Guide: to install and run the tool, you will need a computer installed with Windows XP (or above). Click the following link to download the installer on your local computer, and unzip the file and double click the setup.exe to run the installer. For more information, click on the video clip below which shows the whole installation process.

  • GSWPlannerInstaller.zip (698kb)

  • Video Clip: Tool Installation (2.5 MB).

  • COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The demo tool is licensed under GNU Public License. GSW and the tool authors are not responsible for any damages caused by the software.

         Tool Demo Guide: The tool can be used by student independently, or used under the guidance of academic advisors. In the following, we show a sample usage of the tool by a freshman computer science student.

  1. Input student preference and backgrounds: specify the major, enrollment year of the student. Load the transcript of student (waived if this is the 1st semester for the student). input student preference, e.g., max limit of credit hours per semester.

  2. Decide the curriculum: based on the student's academic backgrounds and personal interests, decide the set of classes to satisfy the degree requirements. For example, a student interested in being a network administrator should take more classes related to network management and information security.

  3. Verify the curriculum: use the tool to verify if the curriculum plan satisfies the degree requirement.

  4. Automatic generation of Academic Plan: use the tool to automatically generate the academic plan which conforms to the pre-requisite relationship among the courses and the multi-year course offering plan.

  5. Refinement of the Academic Plan: if the student is still not satisfied with the automatically generated plan, further refinement can be done using the interaction interface called "Study Plan View".

Another example for a senior student is available in the following. Click on the video clip for more details.

  • Video Clip: advising service for a senior student using CACPS (2.5 MB)

         Related Papers:

  1. X. Fu, B. Peltsverger, C. L. Rozmus, Computer Aided Curriculum Planning and Scheduling, presented at the 110th annual Southern Association of Colleges and Schools - Commission on Colleges meeting (2005 SACS-COC), Atlanta, GA, Dec 4th, 2005. [Paper] [PowerPoint Slides]