STOPS: a graph-based study planning and curriculum development tool

STOPS (Software for Target-Oriented Personal Syllabus) is a tool that allows university students to create personal study plans and the staff to maintain and develop course contents and curriculum structure. In the system, the curriculum is modeled as a graph of learning outcomes. First, the courses are broken down to learning outcomes, i.e. what a student should know after completing a course. Second, prerequisite dependencies are defined between the outcomes. Finally, programmes are defined as goals that students can choose for their studies. Programmes consist of competence outcomes that have prerequisite dependencies from the outcomes of the courses. The resulting graph can be visualized so that students can see how the topics taught in various courses are connected to each other, and what each course contributes to the goals that the student has selected. For curriculum developers, the visualizations can reveal shortcomings such as unnecessary repetition or lacking coverage of topics in the course contents.