September 23, 2007
Courses and Quals Bingo Cards
One of the reasons I started looking at various ways of visualising OU courses and qualifications was a conversation in which the main topic of conversation was how difficult it was for our students to see at-a-glance the possible courses they needed to take to get a particular qualification, given the courses they have already taken, or easily ascertain which qualification they may have made good progress towards given a set of individual courses they may have taken out of personal or professional interest.
Looking over the following treemap a couple of days ago, it struck me how much like a courses and qualifications bingo card it was, or at least, could be:
Given a set of course codes corresponding to the courses taken by a particular person, I could quite easily see these being crossed off on the card.
Where two or more courses are part of an excluded combination within a particular qualification, they could be grouped together by a prominent border, and completion of one course would gray out others in the combination. The border around the excluded combination would be of use when no courses within that combination had been taken yet.
One thing the above treemap representation does not denote is the relative points weighting of different courses - some are rated at 30 points, others at 60, for example. An undergraduate degree typically requires satisfactory completion of 360 points worth of study.
Ideally, this should be reflected in some way. If we allow ourselves to have blank squares within the confines of each qualification, then area could be used to denote points value.
If nothing else, it could be quite an interesting addition to a MySpace personal page!
Posted by ajh59 at September 23, 2007 08:29 PM