Supporting Enrollment in Higher Education Through a Visual Recommendation System

Nowadays, most universities offer programmes and subjects online, specially in the case of fully online open/distance universities. Students have a higher degree of flexibility, which allows them to choose among an endless list of subjects for advancing within their degree. Although this can be seen as a positive result of enrollment flexibility policies, it may be also the source of one of the most well-known problems in open/distance education: high dropout rates, partly caused by inadequate enrollment. In this paper we propose a recommendation system that helps students to navigate through the list of available subjects using a visual metaphor, taking into account students' preferences and previous enrollment data. Our system is based on a two-dimensional map (2D) where subjects that can be taken together appear close to each other, as neighboring regions.