Drake Myers SIS Project, UX Team

Summary: Comparative Analysis of Schedule Planning Tools

The replacement of Telebears is fully underway, and as students begin to

transition and adjust to CalCentral they are also looking for the academic planning tools and resources available to them so that they may better plan out their schedules and make informed class/academic decisions.

Previously, they had a whole host of tools available providing information on professors, grade distributions, when they should enroll in a specific class, etc. However, many of these tools have become inaccessible coinciding with the death of Telebears, causing confusion and frustration amongst students. To quote a sophomore who goes by Jlo “it is counter productive to focus on the replacement of the system itself if the tools we use to actually make decisions are no longer operational”.

While a partial solution has already been adopted with the reintroduction of BerkeleyTime, a large gap remains. When making decisions about what classes to take, students base a large part of their choices on 1) The grade distribution of the class, and 2) How good the professor/class itself is. BerkeleyTime provides the former, which is necessary but not sufficient, as it is missing the years of comments and opinions left by fellow students giving their advice/opinion/information on how good a professor is, what the work load’s like, how interesting the class is, etc.

After talking with and conducting brief interviews with students across campus (primarily in front of the GBC, FSM, and Dwinelle Hall) 7 features were identified as being “core” or nice to have for students while planning their schedules. These features include: grade distributions, schedule planning (looking at/saving potential schedules), student ratings (numerical rating), student comments, enrollment data, class geography (how far apart your classes are, mostly of importance to freshman), and sharing (the ability to share/show your schedule to friends). The first 4 are core features, while the last 3 are nice to have (although all 7 were previously available to students).

Here, 5 different academic planning tools (including non conventional ones like Facebook groups) are compared against each other using the 7 features listed above as criteria. From these graphs we are able to see what the strengths and weaknesses of each tool are, how they compare against each other, and which features need to be addressed/added so that students have all the information they need to make the correct decisions for themselves.

For instance, we can see that Berkeley Time (currently the only operational tool) does extremely well with grade distributions (which is core), along with some other nice to have features (enrollment data and class geography); however, it is severely lacking in schedule planning, student ratings, and student comments which are 3 of the 4 “core” features. This is especially frustrating for students because not only is this important information to have, but also because they used to have it and no longer do. Many students are angry with this because they feel the school has taken something important away from them without replacing it with a reasonable alternative.