Course enrolment dashboard

ANU’s own course enrolment (Programs & Courses / ISIS) makes you check a course’s seats, its prerequisites and your own completed courses in three different places, then enrol in a fourth. This is the version I wish existed: one page that shows a course’s seats and prerequisite status against what you’ve actually completed, and lets you enrol, drop or mark a course complete right there — no separate system, no guessing.

What good looks like here

Four things about the real system are the actual annoyance, so they’re the four things this prototype fixes:

• you can’t tell if a course is full until you try to enrol — here, every course card shows seats left, computed from the courses actually enrolled in.
• enrolling means leaving the page you were just reading about the course — here it’s a button on the same card.
• prerequisites are stated, not checked against what you’ve done — here each course lists its prerequisites and whether you’ve completed them, and enrolling is rejected server-side if you haven’t.
• there’s no view of what’s left — a progress section totals completed units against a program requirement, and lists what you’ve finished.
• there’s no sense of direction — the real Master of Computing has five specialisations (Artificial Intelligence, Computational Foundations, Computer Systems, Information and Human-Centred Computing, Software Engineering) and picking one is how you know which electives are actually for you — here it’s a panel above the catalog, and matching courses are highlighted rather than buried in a separate page.
• a full or prerequisite-blocked course is a dead end — the real system makes you email the convener for a permission code with no way to track it. Here a blocked course card has a “request permission” button; a convener queue below the catalog lists pending requests with approve/deny actions, and an approved request lets that course be enrolled in regardless of the block, right there on reload.

I chose not to build:

• accounts or multiple students. This is a single-student dashboard — the same scope the starter’s guestbook had. A capacity number is still meaningful without a second student: the seeded catalog includes a course that’s already full, standing in for seats other students have taken.
• real terms or a clock. There’s no notion of a current term or a session actually running; “completing” a course is a deliberate action (mark it complete) rather than something that happens when a term ends.
• timetable/session clash checking. A real pain point, but a different slice — this one is about what you can enrol in, not when it’s on.
• catalog or specialisation administration. The course list and the five specialisations are both a fixed seed applied once at boot; adding or editing either isn’t a flow this prototype offers. Choosing a specialisation only highlights its electives in the catalog — it never hides a course, since an elective under one direction can still be a prerequisite a course under another direction needs.
• a real convener login. There’s still only one student here — the permission-request queue is a second panel on the same single-user page, modeling both sides of the request rather than adding real accounts. An approved request also waives both the prerequisite and capacity checks together; modeling which specific restriction was the one actually waived wasn’t worth the added complexity for this slice.

Server-side validation is the one thing I treat as non-negotiable rather than a judgement call: a course being full or a prerequisite being unmet is re-checked on the server on every enrol attempt, never assumed from a disabled button in the browser.