Thinking with Ursa

A significant portion of my week was spent working on curriculum changes. It is an interesting work, actually, because a lot of it deals with imagination. When you set curriculum as described in catalogue, you have to imagine all possible implications such changes may have. For example, we have found a few bugs that created problems in this registration session; none of these were on our radar screen last year when we introduced the changes. For example, we added a certain prerequisite because program faculty who teach it believe the course should be taken later in the program. We missed of course that it is mathematically impossible for students to fit the specific course so late in the program, because of other requirements. So, they all need to be manually cleared, which is exactly the problem we were trying to solve in the first place. Here is another example: some courses had Provisional admission to a program prerequisite. However, some students went directly to Full admission, and skipped the provisional. In any person’s mind, full supersedes provisional, but computer read these two as separate codes, so it wont’ let fully admitted people to do what provisionally admitted can. We failed to think like a computer, and in a contemporary organization, such a skill is a must.

It is funny how we talk about Ursa (our registration software). She is really a person, but then she is a very peculiar one, with her own logic, her own quirks and obscure rules. We say “Ursa thinks they have not met the requirements,” or “Ursa read this course on their transcripts, and she cannot read the attribute after that.” Ursa has its own logic, so we need to learn to think like Ursa. We wonder how to make Ursa understand something, how to translate our point into Ursa’s logic. YOU cannot argue with her, but you can trick her into doing what we want, only if you understand the way she thinks.

It is all about imagination. We consider possible implications of our curricular changes for students, programs, faculty. It is all but impossible to anticipate all consequences of a change, but we need to see at least the major ones. My wonderful curriculum team, Vicky and Karon, and I take one change, one specific adjustment, and then we basically let our imaginations run. How is it going to affect A, B, and C? What about past and the future? Let’s imagine those students two years from now? What about all these special circumstances we know about? In a way, it is like writing a fiction story, where circumstances are imagined, but they need to have some level of plausibility to them. I guess other people would call it modeling. It is an interesting intellectual and creative challenge though. It requires contextual knowledge of the multiple programs. Funny how computers themselves are not capable of doing such imaginative work. Computers relieved us from a lot of tedious work, but it seems like there is even more demand for human brains that can connect seemingly unrelated dots, and imagine real-life scenarios. Human brains can pick on subtle patters that computer completely ignore, and their owners actually enjoy doing it.