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A new website allows students to stay on top of their degree completion on the go.
The new site called Degree Plans gives students a list of courses necessary to complete a given degree plan in four years as well as a by-semester schedule of those courses. The project started development in May and was released Aug. 15.
UNM Associate Provost for Curriculum Greg Heileman, one of the coordinators for the project, said the application involved many different departments.
“These people were all involved from other places on campus,” he said. “Advising had to pull all these things together, folks were writing descriptions for the interests and things like that. So it took a lot of people to kind of pull it all together.”
Heileman said he enlisted graduate, undergraduate and high school interns to construct the site. He said the University created the program to give students a clear idea of which classes they should take and when.
“There’s a report done by Complete College America, and one of the things they say is that students should have a clear degree plan available to them,” he said. “We wanted to do that online.”
On the site, students can search for their degrees by college.
Once they find their major, students can view the program description, career opportunities for the program, contact information for the department and a degree plan that tells students what courses to take each semester to graduate.
Michael Hickman, a senior involved in Degree Plans’ layout and design, said the site aims to fix any complications UNM students might have had when finding classes to take for their majors.
“I was in that boat,” he said. “It was trying to put together a puzzle without knowing what it’s supposed to look like. I mean it’s just a mess.”
Hickman said the website will offer a “bunch of new features.”
“Let’s say you get off track — you miss a course or you have to repeat a course. Instead of trying to piece together your degree plan, we could eventually get to a place where it does it for you,” he said. “That’s one of our goals, and that would be really useful to students.”
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Kevin Warne, a graduate student involved in Degree Plans’ software engineering, said websites similar to this one helped students better navigate their course requirements at other universities.
“The schools that do have something similar showed pretty drastic increases in graduation rates after getting it out,” he said.
Warne estimates the website cost $50,000 to make. But he said constructing the site commercially with a professional web developer could have cost around $140,000.
Heileman said the school would continue to develop the site for “as long as it’s useful.”
In an email sent to the Daily Lobo, UNM Provost Chaouki Abdallah said he “encouraged” and “supported” the construction of the site.
“The new site provides students, professors, advisers, and parents with information about all UNM degrees,” he said. “It allows anyone with web access to search for a particular degree based on their passion and interests. So far, it has been accessed by individuals from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as from more than 75 countries.”
According to Google Analytics, the site already has 8,580 visits and 66,738 page views.
For more information on Degree Plans visit degrees.unm.edu
