Shaffner also noted that students often use the CS50 tool in combination with the catalog, department pages, and the Courses of Instruction site. Although Shaffner said that his team has not yet reached out to CS50 course staff, he hopes that new tool will streamline the many platforms currently in use.
“Sometimes you only get part of the answer from each of those tools,” Shaffner said.
A year from now, if the new catalog is launched according to plan, students will be able to register, search for courses, and submit their study cards all on a whole new platform. Like the CS50 website, the new catalog will have filtering and keyword search tools, but according to Shaffner, the catalog will expand upon CS50’s functionalities by personalizing the browser to track degree progress.
“We plan to be able to support the web services capabilities that are used today by the CS50 application, to be able to consume the data from our system,” Shaffner said. “But our hope is that we’ll be able to make the data set better and more accurate, and have more dimensions to it.”
But even as the technical capabilities of the course catalog expand, some professors wonder if more targeted searches and filters will limit students’ academic options and mitigate serendipity in course selection. For his part, Anthropology Director of Undergraduate Studies Richard H. Meadow expressed concern about students missing opportunities to find courses they might not otherwise think to look for.
“The problem with that is that you need to know what sort of keywords you are going to look for,” Meadow said in an interview in April. “ If you haven’t ever thought about looking for [a course about] food, you’d never look for food.”
He also expressed concern that catalog browsing tools encourage students to focus solely on crossing concentration requirements off their lists, as opposed to nurturing new and more general academic interests.
“A lot of times, students think, ‘Okay, these are the courses I need to take for my concentration. And now I’m going to fit everything around it,’” Meadow said. “You get things fixed, and you fill in the slots.”
Computer Science Director of Undergraduate Studies and former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 said he also worries about students being “too directed” and “assuming an intellectual identity too early and too resolutely.”
But for Lewis, this pedagogical problem does not stem from improved browsing tools but from the changing academic priorities of Harvard undergraduates.
“Blocking the advance of technology is not the right way to address that problem,” Lewis said. “People need to take a step back in terms of thinking what their educational goals are.”
—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Meg_Bernhard.