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Press Coverage
Advisor was covered in an edition of the Greentree Gazette . The higher-ed business publication's discussion of degree audit systems identified Advisor as one of "two niche products [that] appear to dominate this specialty."

The Requirements Manager is a Web-based application through which registrars can enter and maintain their school's degree requirements. Unlike many degree audit systems there are no arcane scripting languages to learn; bulletin operations are accomplished through this simple yet powerful point-and-click interface. All interactions between the Requirements Manager and the Advisor appliance are secured with SSL encryption.

Requirements Manager

Degree requirements are organized into an expandable, hierarchical tree view, just like a standard Windows Explorer® file system browser. Users can expand the tree to see only what they need to see at any given time, and are always immediately aware of their exact location within the structure of the degree requirements. Users can even copy and paste requirements, just like they can in a file system. This makes entering new years as simple as copying and pasting the previous year's requirements. Just rename the copy and apply any changes you have made to your requirements for the coming year.

At the bottom of every degree requirement tree are lists of course requirements and course options. These lists can be complicated, and thus could be time consuming to establish and maintain. However, the Requirements Manager contains tools that make administration of your course lists a snap. Wildcards can be used to enter large numbers of courses quickly, and individual courses can easily be added or removed from the list. For ultra-low maintenance, course lists can be made to dynamically update themselves when new courses are added to your course catalog. For example, a course list could be created that would always contain every ENGL course, even ones that came into existence long after the course list was created. You can view a screenshot of the course list interface and watch a video demonstration.

Sometimes you may need to allow courses to be applied to multiple areas of a degree. The Requirements Manager contains a robust re-use interface that allows you to indicate what re-use is acceptable with a very high level of specificity. For example, you could choose to allow 8 credits to be reused between Majors and Minors, or even between a particular Major and a particular Minor. Credit and grade distribution in these situations can also be controlled.

Parameters are additional restrictions that can be added to degree requirements. A Major in History, for example, might require a minimum of 40 credits, a GPA of 2.5, and individual course grades of C or better. All of these restrictions could be added as parameters of the Major requirement. Many types of parameters are available in the Requirements Manager to cover the wide range of requirements found at different schools. One of the more powerful options is the ability to restrict parameters to certain students based on features of those students, such as the fact that they are double-majoring or that they have taken some specific course. Another is the ability to pick out highly specific groups of courses for the purpose of applying credit limits or grade requirements. For example, you could require that students achieve a B or better in all 499E courses taken by graduate students for at least 3 credits. You can view a screenshot of the parameter interface .

Many degree audit systems use their own custom scripting or markup languages to encode degree requirements. This means that someone at your institution has to learn that language and use it to manage the requirements, a frustrating, ongoing, time-consuming task. But how can we claim to avoid this without sacrificing power? It's true that scripting and markup are powerful tools for defining complex relationships, primarily because they are so open-ended. Yet at the bottom of the Requirements Manager you will find the very same ability to create infinitely-complex logical relationships that exists within the syntax of such languages. Whenever you need it, the power is there for you, along with a graphical interface to help you maintain such complexity over time. In other words, we've relegated the power of scripting to the tiny corner of your degree requirements that actually need it, which means that you no longer have to deal with the daunting overhead of a script-based degree requirement system.

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