CourseCompass: Revolutionizing College Course Selection Planning with AI Conversational Assistants

An intelligent course selection assistant designed specifically for CSUF students, generating personalized semester course plans via natural dialogue

For college students, course selection every semester is a headache-inducing battle. Faced with a complex course catalog, intricate prerequisite requirements, credit limits, and personal schedule arrangements, many students often feel at a loss. Traditional course selection methods often rely on static course registration systems or manual consultations, lacking personalized intelligent recommendations.

Students at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) also face this challenge. How to choose the most suitable course combination based on personal interests and career plans while meeting degree requirements? How to balance academic workload within limited time? These issues have spurred the demand for intelligent course selection tools.

CourseCompass is a conversational AI course selection assistant designed specifically for CSUF students. It helps students plan their semester course schedules through natural language interaction. Students only need to input their major, completed courses, credit preferences, and learning goals; the system then uses large language models to generate personalized course plans and provides clear explanations for each recommendation.

The core innovation of this project lies in transforming the traditional static course selection process into a dynamic, intelligent conversational experience. Students no longer need to manually flip through thick course manuals or switch between multiple web pages for queries; instead, they can get professional course selection advice through simple conversations.

CourseCompass adopts a clear frontend-backend separation architecture to ensure system maintainability and scalability.

Backend Architecture Built on Python's Flask/FastAPI framework, core components include:

• app.py: Main application entry point, handles HTTP requests and routing
• llm_handler.py: Integrates Google Gemini API, responsible for interacting with large language models
• data_loader.py: Loads course catalog and degree requirement data
• validator.py: Validates prerequisite requirements and constraints
• prompt_engine.py: Prompt engineering logic, optimizes interaction effects with LLMs
• config.py: Centralizes management of configuration settings

Frontend Interface Uses a clean Web UI design with HTML/CSS/JavaScript tech stack, providing an intuitive chat interaction experience.

Data Layer Contains structured course data (courses.json) and degree requirement data (degrees.json), ensuring the accuracy and compliance of recommendation results.

CourseCompass's intelligent recommendation system is based on the following key mechanisms:

1. Multi-dimensional Information Collection The system collects multi-dimensional information from students through dialogue, including major direction, completed course history, expected credit load, specific learning goals, etc. This progressive information collection method is more friendly and natural than traditional forms.

2. Prerequisite Validation The validator module automatically checks course prerequisite requirements to ensure the recommended course combination is academically feasible. This avoids the problem of students choosing the wrong courses due to ignoring prerequisite conditions.

3. Personalized Recommendation Generation Using the powerful capabilities of the Google Gemini large language model, the system can comprehensively consider students' personal situations and generate tailored course plans. Each recommendation comes with a detailed explanation to help students understand the basis for the decision.

4. Constraint Handling The system can handle various practical constraints, such as time conflicts, credit caps, mandatory course priorities, etc., ensuring the generated course schedule meets both academic requirements and personal needs.

CourseCompass has a wide range of application scenarios:

Freshman Enrollment Planning: Helps newly enrolled freshmen understand the course system and develop a reasonable four-year study plan.

Semester Course Selection Assistance: Quickly generates candidate course combinations before each semester's course selection, saving decision-making time.

Major Transfer Adaptation: Provides course planning advice for students transferring majors to accelerate the adaptation process.

Pre-Graduation Check: Helps graduating students confirm whether they meet all degree requirements to avoid omissions.

The practical significance of this project lies in applying AI technology to actual pain points in the education field, improving students' course selection experience and learning efficiency. It is not only a technical demonstration but also a tool with practical application value.

CourseCompass's architectural design has good scalability. By updating the JSON files in the data directory, it can easily adapt to the course systems of other universities or colleges. The independent design of the prompt engineering module also allows optimization for different LLM providers.

Possible future expansion directions include:

• Integrate real-time course capacity query
• Add professor evaluation data reference
• Support multi-semester long-term planning
• Introduce peer course selection preference analysis

CourseCompass demonstrates how to apply large language model technology to educational scenarios to solve practical problems that students face daily. Through conversational interaction and intelligent recommendations, it turns the tedious course selection process into a simple and efficient one. For developers exploring AI educational applications, this is an open-source project worth referencing.