Pathways are example templates for students and advisors showing how a program could be completed by recommended courses and requirements sequenced by term. Students can utilize Pathways when exploring and building their student plan. This tool assists advisors and students in term by term planning, rather than just providing them with a list of all classes needed. Pathways can be applied to a Student's Plan as a initial foundation of the Plan itself.
Pathways are similar to Four Year Plans that can be found in the Catalogs and Course Information.The key difference is that Pathways do not always include institutional requirements, or additional minors but rather recommended courses sequenced by semester. Actual course selection and sequence will vary individually by each student. Pathways provide the recommended sequence of courses, but do not enforce that sequence.
Advisors also help students to plan other experiences to enrich undergraduate education such as internships, education abroad, undergraduate research, learning communities, and service learning and community-based learning. These types of elements are not included in Pathways.
Quick link to Pathway topics:
| Browsing Pathways | Applying a Pathway | Placeholders |
Pathways can be accessed from either the left menu and you can filter by Program type.
As an advisor, available Pathways are displayed by which department you belong to, then all other Pathways are provided after that. Each Pathway that is created is based off of program Major and catalog year.
Once a Pathway is selected to review, you will see courses placed by the student year and term.
Pathways are very similar in design to the Planner Students, when they are viewing a Pathway have an option to click on the "Apply to your plan" button, which allows them to apply the Pathway and experiment on how they could complete that selected program.
Example Pathway: Mathematics, BA (2024-25)
At the top of the Pathway, the major and catalog year are displayed first. Then the suggested sequence of courses and requirements by semester are provided. To the left, a side panel will display. This side panel allows students to view remaining courses/requirements, current progress which essentially the Planned view of the degree audit, and course search. The course search allows the user to drag and drop course options into the plan.
You may notice that required courses are outlined in a solid line, and general requirements are outlined in a dashed line. The requirements that are outlined with a dashes are placeholders.
Placeholders save space for a requirement that has a range of course options that would satisfy that requirement.
For example, in this Pathway, there is a BA Language requirement, by clicking on the placeholder, the sidebar will appear in the Search Courses tab and provide a list of available courses to satisfy the requirement.
When clicking on a specific course tile, the course details will be displayed such as course description, attributes, instructors and more.
When Pathways are applied to the Student Plan, then courses can be dragged and dropped into specific semesters and satisfy the placeholder requirements.
