The PATH to Better Course Selection and Programme Builder For Students

PATH was successfully deployed as a research project to three schools in the College of Science and Engineering (Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics and Astronomy).  It allows students to

• view all available courses, read student review of courses, select courses and generate timetables
• choose courses available in the student's programme: students can dynamically choose courses from their DPT and see how those choices affect available courses in later years
• browse all available degree programmes

Following the launch of PATH we've had some great feedback from staff and student.

Some of the staff feedback:

• It looks fantastic and a huge amount of enhancement - thanks
• It looks good. I like the new course format
• DPTs look very good indeed.  I particularly like the functionality for choosing courses from the A-Q,T,W type lists

Some students feedback :

• I think PATH is a good initiative, especially because it helps students understand how their current choice of courses can affect their possible choices in future years.
• It MUST be expanded to other Schools. My (Economics) flatmate said to me how jealous he was of the timetabling. Truly remarkable system. Definitely pursue getting this to other Schools as they would benefit tremendously.

More details about the project are available at: https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sce001

If you have an EASE account you can also see the PATH service at: http://path.is.ed.ac.uk/

Franck Bergeret IS Applications Divison