Degree Map: A Case Study

Degree Map is a web-based application that makes it easier for higher-education students to chart their education goals, plan class schedules, track progress toward completion, and remain better informed about degree requirements, time, and costs.

Working with Austin Community College¹, we were able to deploy a pilot program to help students during their advising sessions. During the first year of implementation, several hundred counseling faculty, advisors, and students have used the application, and more than 87,000 advising plans have been submitted using the tool.²

User Research

Observations

To better understand the challenges that advisors face it was important to go out into the field and see firsthand how advising sessions were handled. Austin Community College allowed us the opportunity to come and observe advising sessions with students.

Each Advisor starts cold with the appointment unless students fill out the intake form. Topics generally include questions around classes, credits, majors and financial aid. Students are generally given 30 minutes for each session, which is generous considering the ratio of advisors to students.

All the Advisors used different tools, systems – and handle their sessions differently. The computer systems are also siloed so it takes advisors about 15 minutes to get a complete picture of the student. The session ends with physical notes which can often be misplaced and forgotten. Half of the session was spent finding information and the other half was left for questions and answers. Advisors and students deserved a faster and more informed experience.

Questions

How can we help advisors be more effective and improve the conversation with students?

From our observations there were many opportunities to improve the advising experience. Advisors had to login to multiple systems to get a holistic view of the student. Was there a way to bridge the gap? Advisors also used lots of paper that made it hard to share and keep a record of. Was there a way to give them specific tools to help them answer common student questions?

How can we empower students to make better course and degree choices?

When students came to an advising session we observed that they were often frustrated. Not only did it take time out of their day, often times it was difficult for them to make the trip to visit. Was there a way for us to help students self-advise? Was there also a way to have students be fully informed on their current degree progress before they came to their advising session?

Statistics ³

• Advisors today struggle to support up to 500+ students each
• Graduates average 16-19 more credits than they need
• 60% of students end up switching majors

Wireframe

From our observational research I determined 4 key focus areas: Search, Detail, Match and Compare. These views could be used by both advisors and students. After coming up with a simple flow it was important to understand what content our users wanted to see and when. Over the next several iteration I nailed down content working with advisors and students.

Branding

The Degree Map brand was composed with the Civitas branding in mind. It was important to continue the design language of dots. These dots reenforced the idea of community which would become a theme throughout the product suite. Another important attribute of the brand was the typeface. Often times licensing becomes an issue, so I selected Lato, a free Google font.

Design

During the UI design phase it became important to focus on a few key areas such as: Color, Type and Layout. Color became meaningful throughout the design language. A great example of this was the use of green to denote completed credits. Type was another area where large readable text became important. It was important to consider not only the age of advisors but also the technology they were using. Lastly, layout became a consideration. During testing it became clear advisors needed certain pieces of information static as they navigated from page to page. I chose to create a student profile in the left rail that would remain static across pages. It was important for advisors to always have context no matter where they were in degree map.

Outcome

In Fall 2014, as part of their Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) grant, ACC rolled out the Civitas Learning Degree Map™ application to advisors, counselors and a limited number of students, with adoption being optional. The app would enable students to use their computer or mobile device to plan to select courses aligned with their degree plan and track progress, allowing advisors more time to assist with other challenges.

Within 60 days of making Degree Map available, ACC saw 90 percent adoption with advisors and more than 15,000 degree plans submitted. “We believed that providing all relevant data to advisors and students directly in one view could open up the time needed for a meaningful discussion about course selection, degree planning or changing majors.” said Dr. Wade Bradfute, Executive Dean of Student Services. “Students and advisors could have more genuine, relevant and valuable conversations.”

An early analysis used prediction-based propensity score matching (PPSM) showed a 2.4 percentage point (%pp) increase in persistence for students who used Degree Map over the course of three terms. PPSM matches pairs of like students who are similar based on both their persistence likelihoods and their propensity to participate in an initiative (in this case, use of Degree Map). An additional lift up to 7.3%pp was observed for students who used the app five or more times. “Those results validated our decision to focus our institution’s student success work on transforming our advising process, and reinforced the importance of implementing engaging tools to help students map their journeys, drive the quality of advising conversations, and get students to graduation,” said Fraire.⁴