Megan Trotter | news editor

After rolling out phase one of a new degree-planning program last semester Duquesne is now preparing to introduce phase two to campus.

In September, Duquesne’s Office of Registrar launched the program, referred to as “Degree Planner,” for students in Palumbo-Donahue School of Business, undergraduate students in the School of Nursing, the School of Education and McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts.

Phase two will introduce the program to John G. Rangos Sr. School of Health Sciences,
Mary Pappert School of Music, graduate students in the School of Nursing, the School of Pharmacy, the School of Science and Engineering and Thomas R. Kline School of Law on Feb. 17.

Degree Planner, developed by Stellic, is designed to match “completed and registered coursework with course-specific program requirements that have been predefined in the system,” according to Duquesne’s website.

The program was adopted by Duquesne after the Office of Registrar learned that students and success coaches were having a hard time keeping track of graduation requirements using the Review Academic Program (RAP), which did not have the capacity to look at different degree requirements and how they mutually satisfied each other.

“Everything that’s in the students academic curriculum is going to come in on one plan,” said J.D. Douglas, the director of undergraduate education and student success.

In April 2024, prior to the initial launch last semester, the Office of Registrar and Duquesne success coaches began developing individual academic programs within Degree Planner.

“A lot of the success coaches are the ones that know the curriculum best. So depending upon the school, there were one or multiple point persons that were the individuals that actually built the requirements,” Douglas said. “Part of the verification and validation period was once the builds of the requirements were complete in Degree Planner [we] then took current students and we looked at them, and we compared them with the paper files and with what was in RAP and what was showing up in Degree Planner, so we could make any changes that were necessary.”

The Student Government Association has been an active part of meetings surrounding Degree Planner’s introduction to Duquesne’s campus.

Vice President of Academic Affairs Braden Niles said that Degree Planner is designed to help success coaches have more time to build a holistic relationship with students. Rather than worrying about scheduling, the new program gives students and advising faculty more time to talk about career options, although getting Degree Planner up and running takes time.

“The process behind this is really intensive, and it requires coding for every single course and every single program, and so obviously that’s very tedious, so that takes a whole lot of time,” Niles said. “They’re ahead of schedule, but it’s coming out in … waves as it is completed.”

Surrounding Pittsburgh colleges such as Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh also use a version of Stellic’s system.

University Registrar Kimberly Hoeritz and Douglas said that Duquesne spent 18 months looking at several demo programs to replace RAP.

“I talked with the registrar at CMU … CMU was one of the founding schools that developed Degree Planner. One of their computer science degree candidates took this on,” Hoeritz said.

Stellic came out ahead due to its “robust and very user friendly interface,” Douglas said.

“That just seemed really dynamic and the best way to serve our students,” he said to The Duke.

The initial introduction of Degree Planner had minimal issues according to Douglas and Hoeritz.

Originally, Degree Planner was not showing up in some student’s student portals; however Niles alerted Duquesne and the caching issue was resolved quickly over winter break.

“I think the feedback from the students has been good. We’ve had what our consultant believes is a pretty robust use of the system in four months of being live for the schools that had it available to them,” Douglas said.

Currently over 50% of students in eligible schools have made use of it during this semester’s registration period.

“All success coaches were trained on how to use Degree Planner. And then also for students who, if they want to take that more individual approach, there’s informational videos on the website,” Niles said.

Hoeritz said that at its current stage the Office of Registrar is looking for student feedback and encourages students to email registrar@duke.edu.