Samenvatting

Aiming for increased accessibility and adaptability, higher educational institutes are making their curricula more flexible, offering students more freedom to choose what courses they want to take. Making a well-informed choice out of many possible elective courses is difficult, because it requires the processing of a lot of, sometimes hard to find, information. In this paper, we describe the development of an evidence-informed digital tool to support CS students in a structured and informed exploration of all offered elective courses. Our focus is on a tool that will support students in making an autonomous choice and as such not give automated recommendations, since giving students ownership of the choice process will increase commitment and identification with the final choice, which in turn results in higher retention and satisfaction. To help students with this type of choice, research has been conducted with the following central question: “How can we support students with a choice support system for making autonomous well-informed choices for elective courses?”. To this aim, we conducted a design-oriented mixed method approach: based on an exploratory literature review and seven semi-structured interviews with students and study career advisors, we synthesized tentative success criteria and design principles for such a digital support tool, which guided the subsequent development of two prototypes by student project teams. We assessed the developed prototypes against the design principles, as well as two openly available Dutch course catalogues. The results include two prototypes that implement most of the design principles, elaborate trace log functionality and a backlog with additional functionalities. In the near future, we have planned a simulation study and a subsequent design and development iteration, with the ultimate goal of deriving design knowledge for software that supports a student in making well-informed choices in flexible higher education.