Course Manager

Problem

Students had no clear way to visualize how their course choices now would affect their options later — prerequisite chains were opaque and academic planning was reactive rather than intentional.

Discovery & Approach

Spoke with students and advisors. Advisors were spending significant time on questions that a visual prerequisite model could answer. Students didn't lack motivation to plan — they lacked the information architecture to do it. Course Manager was designed around a core constraint: it had to coexist with Krea's advising structures, ERP, and administrative workflows — not replace them.

Key Product Decisions:

• Modeled prerequisites as directed graphs rather than linear lists — this was a deliberate structural choice to make dependency chains visible, not just sequential.
• Designed for compatibility with existing ERP data exports from day one, which required scoping the feature set down significantly in v1 to prioritize interoperability.

Outcome

Building Course Manager showed how strongly clear visual models can reduce planning anxiety in complex academic systems. Real user testing emphasized that students value reliability and clarity more than feature breadth, especially in high-stakes decision workflows. The project also deepened institutional product collaboration skills by bridging student experience design with university system constraints.