#1349: Visualizing Curricula in Higher Education: A Semantic Similarity Approach

Many institutions give students some freedom to choose courses across disciplines. Yet, existing course registration technologies often present courses as a textual list by discipline, leading to extraneous cognitive load and a lack of metacognitive awareness of how course decisions relate to the broader curriculum. To support students in making well-informed course choices, we develop a tool to visualize the entire curriculum based solely on course content. We describe its methodology, features, theoretical underpinning from learning sciences research, and ways to mindfully embed the tool into advising sessions.