An Enrollment Dashboard to Reinforce Decision-Making for Students and Advisors

Abstract

Over the past years, there has been a significant increase in the number of students attending online courses in higher education, in some cases due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Online higher education provides greater flexibility in selecting courses in the preferred order, but it also presents challenges due to the amount of different combinations during the enrollment process. In this paper, we describe a dashboard for supporting enrollment in higher education using a map as a visual metaphor, in order to provide students and their advisors with a clear overview of their situation within the degree, and help them to make bet- ter decisions. The enrollment dashboard has been evaluated through an initial series of interviews with advisors, which showed positive results in terms of usability and usefulness. However, several concerns were raised about the parameters used to create the map. These results will be used in future rounds of interviews with students and advisors.