Abstract
Course selection decision making is an extremely tedious task that needs to consider course prerequisites, degree requirements, class schedules, as well as the student's preferences and constraints. As a result, students often make short term decisions based on imprecise information without deep understanding of the longer-term impact on their education goal and in most cases without good understanding of the alternative options. In this paper, we introduce CourseNavigator , a new course exploration service that attempts to address the course exploration challenge. Our service identifies all possible course selection options for a given academic period, referred to as learning paths , that can meet the student's customized goals and constraints. CourseNavigator offers a suite of learning path generation algorithms designed to meet a range of course exploration end-goals such as learning paths for a given period and desired degree as well as the highest ranked paths based on user-defined ranking functions. Our techniques rely on a graph-search algorithm for enumerating candidate learning paths and employ a number of strategies (i.e., early detection of dead-end paths, limiting the exploration to strategic course selections) for improving the exploration efficiency.