Visualization of Enrollment Data using Chord Diagrams
Laia Blasco-Soplón, Josep Grau-Valldosera, Julià Minguillón · 2015
Distance and online universities have usually more flexible academic requirements than brick-and-mortar ones, so students do not uniformly advance within the programme they enroll into as they are supposed to. Furthermore, due to their intrinsic nature, distance students need additional support for deciding which subjects they will take every semester. On the other hand, teachers have usually no idea about what other subjects are taking the students enrolled in their subjects. This paper proposes the use of chord diagrams for visualizing the relationships between pairs of subjects taken by students, with the aim of providing both university managers and students with a clear picture of possible bottlenecks, that is, combinations of subjects that might affect students¿ performance. Chord diagrams can be used to analyze intra-semester data (subjects taken simultaneously) and inter-semester data (sequences of subjects taken by students) and provide a fast overview of what is happening within a given programme at subject level. Furthermore, it is possible to interact with chord diagrams in order to filter and obtain additional subject details if desired.