IDM Course Network

IDM students take an extremely broad diversity of courses. I wanted to create a visualization that would allow people to see both which classes were the most popular (node size), as well as which classes were most closely associated with each other (node links).

See the interactive visualization here.

  • Data Visualization
  • MITidm
  • Network Graph
  • Python/Pandas
Good data visualization can help students find classes they might be interested in while navigating a program with an incredible breadth of student interests.

IDM recruits students from Design, Engineering, and Business backgrounds. The career paths ahead of IDM students are even more diverse. Choosing courses in the short two year program is a struggle, and learning what others have done before can help.

I received the data as an excel document of pairings between students and course, so most of the work involved converting the table to show relationships between courses, with the number of students having taken both showing the strength of the relationship. I used Python's Pandas library for massaging the data. The actual visualization was built on a third party platform called Flourish.

See the Github Repository
  • Type of WorkData Visualization
  • StakeholdersIDM Students
  • Tools UsedPython, Jupyter Notebooks, Pandas, Flourish
  • LocationCambridge, MA