July 05, 2007
Visualising OU Courses and Qualifications
Inspired in part by my post last night on the current OU Intranet Redesign project, I spent twenty minutes or so (no longer - I assure you...[this post took longer to write!]) cutting and pasting a tiny amount of information from the Information technology and computing qualifications page into a Google spreadsheet:
| Qualification | Course |
|---|---|
| C50 | M150 |
| C50 | MU120 |
| C50 | MST121 |
| C47 | M150 |
| C47 | T175 |
| C39 | TT280 |
It was then an easy matter to cut and paste the data into Many Eyes and then visualise it as a ICT Courses and Quals (sample) network diagram:
There are lots of things wrong about this visualisation (not least the typo of qualification GO4!), such as the fact that excluded course combinations are not identified in anyway, but for 20 minutes work the payoff is pretty good, I think?
For example, already it's possible to identify some of the qualifications a course may be associated with, or the breadth of courses that may be taken as part of a particular qualification.
I'm not sure how well this will scale, but the Many Eyes tool does let you move nodes around, zoom in on - and pan across - particular areas of the map, search over labels etc.
In fact, the search is a live search that will highlight labels as you type - so you can just look at level 2 Technology Faculty courses, for example (search on T2) and they will all be highlighted on the map) and then tunnel down to a particular course code to locate it - and the linked qualifications it can used for.
I need to explore Many Eyes in more detail, I think, to see what sorts of mapping are supported (it would be handy, for example, to be able to pop up a course or qualification name when you hover over its code), but I have no more time to spend on this today... :-(
Posted by ajh59 at July 5, 2007 03:14 PMI don't know whether Many Eyes can do this, and obviously you'd have to have the data, but what if the connectors had varied thickness depending on the numbers taking a course as part of a particular qualification. That not only shows popularity of a course, but (more interestingly?) shows up courses that are popular on one qualification but not on another. And/or change node size (like in an atlas) dependent on numbers enrolling (that data at least is available, published in Sesame).
Posted by: Richard at July 9, 2007 03:29 PM