GSLIS Course Planning Applet

Welcome.  This is a pre-release test version of the course planning applet. 

Here how it works:  At the bottom of this page is a link to a Java applet.  Before trying it, here's how it works. 

Try pressing the Plot button first (without making any other selections). The core courses alone appear. Now add a main interest area (try "legal" or something with a few options). The elective field doesn't equate to the main interest area field so you may find some contraintuitive combinations. That's okay - it just means updating the data in the electives field.
Feel free to try all the combinations. [There course buttons appear in a scroll pane (which is deactivated for the moment) so some combinations will show buttons that run off the page.]

The goal of the pre-release version is to get the feeling for the program and to solicit ideas for the main interest, electives, and work area choices. Select none or any combination of areas, courses to exclude, preferred electives, and work domain and press the Plot button.  Press the plot button whenever you have made new selections and want to see the resulting candidate curriculum. Reset options in the dropdown boxes by choosing the first option (the "select...") option in the list.

Each course appears as a button.  Buttons show the Course Number, the Course Name, prerequisites, and the group to which the course belongs. In the final version, pressing the button will retrieval the course description.  The groups are main interest areas, electives, and work domains.  The program is written in a way that'll make changing interest areas, electives, work domains, campus location, etc., very easy: just change the html page that holds the applet.

Main interest and Elective areas:

Archives Academic Business Childrens-YA Government Info Tech Legal Management Medical Music
Org Other Preservation Public Reference Science SLTP Theory Visual  

Work domains:

Academic Academic/Public Archives Childrens Corporate Evaluation Info Tech
School Management Other Public Special Tech WebDev/IA

NB:  Each course was once assigned to a group (Evaluation, Reference, Org of Knowledge, Archives, SLTP, Info Tech); the list was expanded for experimentation.  The main interest groups, electives, and work domains can be expanded to include anything the faculty thinks would be useful.

In addition, there are options to select what campus, time of day (am, pm, night) the user wants or doesn't want.  These options have been disabled in this pre-release test version.

Courses to exclude:
There is an option to deselect certain courses either as a group (Core, Archives, SLTP, Technology, Children's-YA) or individually by course number. More can be added.

Record your choices:
One of the purposes of this applet is to help students consider their options and then submit their choices to the department so that we can plan far in advance for likely course enrollments. This option not yet enabled.

Course Planning Applet Link.

If the link doesn't work, please type this URL directly: http://web.simmons.edu/~benoit/courseplanner/classes/Applet1.html
G Benoit, May 28, 2007