Do you ever feel lost while taking a course not knowing where you stand vis-a-vis all the coursework you have to do and also not knowing what skills you are acquiring from all the activities you're taking?
We present to you the Student Compass, a service that seamlessly extends existing LMS (ex. Moodle) by providing a dynamic, student-friendly visual representation of a course. With the student compass, your progress is automatically tracked and displayed to you in real-time while you complete course activities like reading chapters or submitting assignments so you can locate yourself effortlessly at any time. The service also highlights to you how each activity you undertake contributes to the course outcomes helping you prioritize tasks that best fit your learning goals.
Let's look at how a sample course would look like on the service below.
Overwhelmed?
Don't worry, we're going to break down the graph piece by piece.
Edges Representation
The edges represent the different activities inside a course. For example, this edge represents the activity of reading the HTML basics chapter.
Nodes Representation
The nodes represent the different stages in the course. For example, the first stage here is to read the HTML basics and CSS basics Chapters, and the second stage is to complete the website idea assignment.
Edges Types
The animated edges represent the ongoing activities in the course. The green-colored edges represent the activities that are already done in a course. In this example, the activity of reading the HTML Basics Chapter is already done. The next activity is to read the CSS basics.
Nodes Description
The nodes will be filled in proportion with your current progress between stages. In this example the first node on the left has three activities, two of them are done so we will be filling 2/3 of the node in green reflecting your progress. If you encounter a group of nodes linked together then you must complete all the activities of the combined nodes in order to move forward.
Outcomes Description
Each course has a list of outcomes. An outcome can be viewed as a skill that you will take once you achieve the course. By selecting an outcome from the drop-down list you will notice some changes in your map. The edges that are faded out are not linked to the selected outcome which means the activity that they represent does not contribute to the selected outcome. The width of the line is proportional to the contribution of the activity to the selected outcome. If an edge is green colored it means that the activity that contributes to this outcome is done.
We're currently integrated with the Student Compass Moodle service and working on adding other integrations as well, so if you are a user of this service log in with your account and check out what the Student Compass has to offer 😄