Project title Academic Prerequisites Manager
Project Description Academic degrees and majors are structured as a set of units (core and electives). The order in which units are undertaken is determined by unit prerequisites. Formal prerequisites specify a logical combination of units already completed and the program a student is enrolled in etc. Additionally there are some informal "common sense" prerequisites and written policies, such as completing all level 1 units in a program before enrolling in the level 2 units. Currently human intelligence and effort is needed to specify and check prerequisites, and to interpret the prerequisites in UWA's two course management systems: callista and caidi. Additionally, a replacement for caidi is currently underway, and this new system should also be taken into account.

This project is to design a system for specifying prerequisites and write a software tool for interpreting prerequisites to check for valid enrolments. The project will involve first understanding the current ways in which prerequisites are encoded: random string; interpreted in callista and caidi done by hand; student services manually overrides some rules; calista everything in great detail; caidi designed for reading eg "12 points of programming". The enrollment system, callista, typically lists every single case and is designed for checking when students enrol in a unit. The main deliverable of the project will be a prototype system for defining ad checking unit prerequisite rules. The system should include guidance on how to specify prerequisites, it should facilitate clear specification and checking of prerequisites, and it should enable automatic checking of student enrolments.

Client Feba Chacko, UWA Curriculum
Other Stakeholders UWA Curriculum team, CSSE Program Chairs
Desirable Prior Experience Algorithms and problem solving; Software Interfaces
Special Conditions None
Intellectual Property The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons (open source)
Further Information
Version CITS5206 17 July 2023