The Curriculum Compass: Student-Facing Curriculum Builder
Background Information
Students at higher education institutions currently navigate their study trajectories through standard course catalogues, such as OSIRIS, which present information on a course-by-course basis. While these systems effectively describe individual module requirements, they fail to illustrate how separate courses interconnect, leaving tacit prerequisites, recurring learning goals, and overall academic progression largely invisible. Consequently, students must assemble the broader structure of their curriculum independently over time, making it difficult to answer fundamental questions regarding why specific concepts are taught at particular stages of their degree. This lack of structural transparency directly hinders the ambition to foster self-directed learners who can confidently shape and reflect upon their personal learning paths. Furthermore, university staff and curriculum committees lack a shared, dynamic visualization of the educational programmes they collectively deliver. Without an integrated visual mapping tool, transitioning toward flexible, modular learning pathways remains exceptionally difficult. To address this challenge, a novel educational interface is needed that transforms raw course data into an interactive, connected graph. Such an approach provides students with clear structural visibility across their entire educational journey while helping educators design more cohesive academic pathways.
Aim of the Project
The primary objective of this project is to develop and pilot "The Curriculum Compass," an open, student-facing curriculum builder that visualises complex educational pathways as interactive connected graphs. The innovation is structured into two distinct operational layers. Layer 1 ingests institution-wide OSIRIS catalogue data to provide students with a clear graphical overview of course relationships, prerequisite flows, and recurring learning goals across all bachelor courses. Layer 2 executes a deeper exploratory pilot within the Economics of Innovation learning line, analysing full course materials across three specific courses to extract and map individual taught topics. By comparing these two layers, the project evaluates whether topic-level visibility offers substantial added value over standard catalogue visualisations, helping students better understand how foundational concepts build toward advanced project applications. The resulting software will be delivered at high digital accessibility standards and released as open-source code so that other higher education institutions can adopt and adapt the builder. Ultimately, the Curriculum Compass aims to empower self-directed learning, facilitate just-in-time knowledge navigation in challenge-based settings, and support academic committees in developing flexible, modular curricula.
This project is still ongoing.
For more information, please contact:
