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What problem are we solving? (Pain points)
Creating a planner for an entire course with every semester details separately
Easy to track the course completed and to plan for upcoming semester.
Can create your own custom plan or use the template provided by the system.
For whom? (Customers)
For incoming & existing students of UTD
When do they experience this issue?
At the beginning of each semester, before enrolling in the course.
What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)
We have 20 145
users testing data We have the beta version ready, and 20 feedbacks for the beta versionbased on the survey conducted in March’23.
Which customers are we working with, or hearing from, to better understand this problem? (User Testing, Focus Groups)
Undergrad and Graduate existing student
Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?
There is no single platform that offers all the primary information required for course selection in a single place.
Need something which saves students’ time as they waste it by switching between apps, contacting previous students, and taking demo classes.
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How are we solving this issue?
Creating an intuitive website that provides the list of courses based on the degree plan, eventually saves students time and helps them in making decisions about the right plan for their semester.
What alternatives did we consider?
Students can go to galaxy portal and check for the course availability as well as go to coursebook to check for professors availability and syllabusschedule planner for the availability of professors and the courses.
Contacting Academic Advisor
Contacting other students.
Research according to own’s interest
Why did we land with this?
To provide a readily accessible, easy to use and intuitive platform that provide detail about all the degree plans with its courses ready to drag and drop the classes for the semester, export the plan and get ready for the semester
What is the general shape of this solution?
It will be an easily accessible and user-friendly website with reliable data about the degree plan with credit hours and total courses needed to complete the degree based on relevant plan
Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?
Yes, Galaxy/coursebook
How will we know that we’ve solved this issue?
If students can make enrollment decisions fast, approximately within one day (currently, from the user testing data – they take a minimum of 3 days). ??????????????
Students only use UTD trends and course curriculum to make enrollment decisions. ?????????/
What will we measure?
Reduction in time required to plan the degree as well as your semester.
Improvement in Academic performances for students who took enrollment decisions using Nebula planner. (Collect this information using a survey)?????????????
Have we considered how we’re building this to be fast, performant, scalable, and/or relatively low-cost on our services? --------------
We are using reliable course data from UTD.
We will use a reliable cloud server to host our website and a secure database to store the information.
We will use the flexible web stack for the development of the website and hence make it vertically scalable.
We will be using a monitoring tool (potentially an inbuilt tool from AWS/Heroku or any cloud provider) to monitor the average load on the website and its scalability.
In the future, we will use a load balancer to make it more fault tolerant.
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