Proposals

Abstract

This proposal aims to improve DawgPath (https://dawgpath.uw.edu/), a popular academic discovery and planning tool launched by UW-IT in 2022. Students face a number of challenges as they navigate their path to a degree, particularly with regard to course and major discovery. With thousands of courses and hundreds of majors across three campuses, discovering courses and majors that match their academic interests can be difficult, especially for new students and those rejected by capacity-constrained majors looking to find an alternative major leading to similar career opportunities. To address these challenges, DawgPath will provide students with recommendations, improved exploration, and new insights. This next iteration of DawgPath will: Focus students on the degrees and course options that work for them by developing a course, major, and minor recommendation engine, based on a student’s specific academic interests. Make academic exploration easier for students by implementing search across course and major descriptions by keyword, such as “climate change” or “analytics.” Launch a tri-campus major exploration feature to empower students with visibility of similar majors offered across the three campuses. Provide career insights that help students connect the dots between majors and careers by developing a feature that lists the degrees that led UW graduates to their first job. For example, a student can view the majors that led UW graduates to become Business Systems Analysts. These features will be provided via a personalized dashboard within DawgPath where students can view information and recommendations tailored to their academic and career interests.

Access