Drexel’s Office of Inter-College Advising announced on July 17 that DegreeWorks had been updated with a new interface. DegreeWorks is the online portal that students use to plan out their academic schedule and view progress on their degree. They emphasized that this redesign is mobile-friendly, which is a huge step up as the old interface would not size correctly on mobile screens, making many features inaccessible. Now degree overviews, “What-If”s, plan calendars, plan audits and all other DegreeWorks features are available and easy to use on your phone.
The desktop version is also markedly different, losing the blocky and compact layout for a more minimalist, spaced out and linear one. The side menus have all been moved to the header, so nothing is nested and individual info cards are front and center. Courses and course groups are no longer in a lined table, which notoriously takes up a lot of horizontal space that phones do not have. Course completion status is displayed with a small icon, or just text in the case of in-progress classes, which might be harder to scan than completely colored rows and bolded “IP” markers. A new feature is an icon marking classes that require prerequisites, and like before, students can click on the class to see what those prerequisites are.
The biggest functional changes have been with plans. All of the view modes have been consolidated to just two: calendar (which allows you to plan classes for specific terms and shows up when you open a plan), and audit (which compares your class list with your degree requirements, and can be accessed with the “Audit” button). Audits, instead of using the same dynamic tables as worksheets, now give out a flat list of all classes separated into portions of a student’s program (such as a major, a minor and coop), with “(IP)” written next to classes that are planned or currently in progress. There is no indication of whether a class has been completed or is yet to be, or what group it is in.
This update comes quite soon after Drexel updated their main information website at drexel.edu. They operate plenty of other web applications which have been stagnant for a while, so we might be getting more interface redesigns like these in the future.