Academic website to provide college career roadmap

Google Maps can help you get from point A to point B, and now IU wants to help you do the same from freshman year to graduation.

The Office of the Provost’s Enhancing Undergraduate Education at IU Bloomington is creating a website to help students map out their college careers from start to finish in the form of a roadmap website.

The new program, proposed by the office’s task force, will be an “easy-to-find, easy-to-use online academic roadmap for undergraduates,” said Sonya Stephens, vice provost for undergraduate education. She said it would also be “an intellectual equivalent to the OneStart system with a single portal for campus services.”

The program will help students identify and document what they have done and what still needs to be done before graduation.

“The idea is that students will be able to know where they are at any point of their college careers,” IU Dean of Students Pete Goldsmith said. “They can also lay out other things they want to accomplish like leadership, international travel, internships and so much more.”

The roadmap program will be a new way for students to approach all the different information that IU has to offer.

“The IUB web site is extremely rich in information, but you must be determined to pursue intensive research from site to site to locate the kind of opportunities that exist,” Stephens said. “We want to make that information more readily available to you by putting it all where you are most likely to see it.”

Sophomore Susanna Johnson said she agreed with Stephens, citing difficulty in planning her own college experience.

“Looking for all the information I need about my class schedule, Honors College requirements and figuring out what classes I need to take always takes so long,” Johnson said. “If it were all in one place, it would be so much more convenient and easy.”

The project is still being developed, but pieces of the roadmap are being created now. There is no deadline for the roadmap completion, but Stephens said some elements will be released as soon as they are ready.

“It will take time to develop, and it is likely that the earliest releases will not have all the components right away,” Stephens said. “We want, of course, to do as much as we can as quickly as we can.”