Visualized, annotated, connected: what should the course catalog look like in the 21st century? Leveraging data and design in a post-disciplinary era.
Try it out at curricle.berkman.harvard.edu (advanced beta)
Keep up to date with the latest features and project updates
Once, a university’s course catalog was a big book. Students could flip through it, write on its pages, and feel the depth of how many classes were offered. When the catalog went digital, this physical aspect was lost, leaving students with a flattened screen that showed courses as isolated atoms in a list. In 2015, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences commissioned metaLAB to create a product to address this gap, as well as help make Harvard a data-smart institution. In response, we developed Curricle, a platform of digital tools that maps the Harvard curriculum through elegant data visualizations.
Curricle complements the standard online course search experience by restoring the aspects of the physical catalog, creating digital spaces that illuminate courses as part of knowledge networks. Focused primarily on enlivening the course selection experience for students, Curricle also serves faculty and administrators by providing more functionally intuitive methods of engaging with the course catalog and the history of Harvard. Three years in the making, Curricle exhibits metaLAB’s focus on bridging technology and the humanities, as well as how metaLAB serves the Harvard community.
We’re excited to be testing an advanced beta version of Curricle during the 2019-2020 academic year. If you are interested in participating with a variety of student groups and peer advisors that will be in dialogue with metaLAB about the Curricle experience, please email us at info@metalab.harvard.edu.
New for fall 2019 are the following features:
- TRANSCRIPT data now appears automatically in your Curricle schedule
- Links to EVALUATIONS and SYLLABI (when available) can be accessed directly from every course pop-up window
- You can now one-click EXPORT your finalized schedule into my.harvard for registration
Curricle is available at CURRICLE.BERKMAN.HARVARD.EDU.