SSP - My Academic Plan (MAP)
My Academic Plan (MAP)
With MAP, advisors can build a schedule with their students to help them stay on track towards program completion or a degree.
Course Advising and a Student’s Pathway to Degree Completion
MAP is a student advising process that combines the characteristics of prescriptive academic advising with the strengths of technology-supported record keeping. From the available course list that is pulled from the institution’s student information system, the advisor and student partner together to map out the individual courses for the student. Once the plan is created, the advisor then has the ability to print or email the MAP to the student. The student also has access to their MAP from MyGPS.
MAP equips students with specific, long-range, and accurate plans for the completion of their academic goals. These plans guide the student's course selection term-by-term. The documentation of the plan by the advisor guides students’ decisions on course selections that are in their best interest at the time of registration. These decisions help maintain the student’s pursuit of academic goals. The MAP sets up appropriate goals and expectations for a student.
Ultimately, the MAP tool provides structure around the way the college documents and communicates an individual student’s path to success. MAP helps students stay on track by narrowing down course options so students can enroll in appropriate courses.
MAP can be customized to meet each institution’s goals. MAP is designed to:
- Allow the advisor to capture detailed notes regarding the student’s academic plan every step of the way. Notes can be captured for individual courses, terms, and at the overall academic plan. The advisor decides if the notes should appear for other advisors/coaches, and/or to students.
- Empower the institution to configure department/degree program templates to be utilized by the advisors. These templates create a blueprint for the course requirements for the advisors and coaches to build from when creating the individualized academic plans.
- Furnish an individualized, clear, and coherent pathway to completion for each student to prevent the confusion that recent research has shown comes from extensive choices and options.
- Demystify and rationalize the jumble of prerequisites, course sequences, degree requirements, etc. that students face during each course registration cycle.
- Adapt to the idiosyncratic character of each student’s completion pathway. Unlike traditionally used degree audits, MAP charts the student’s path according to their desired attendance pattern and their specific need for academic remediation as decided together by the student and advisor.
- Aggregate data across plans in order to provide course demand information to academic administrators who make course quantity and scheduling decisions for future terms.
