StreamLiner: A General-Purpose Interactive Course-Visualization Tool

We present StreamLiner, originally developed as an interactive `focus+context' tool for visualizing biologists' laboratory notebooks and other time-based activities, both online and off-line. We describe how to adapt StreamLiner as a teaching tool for biology students: Streamliner provides a unified way to visualize any type of stream, including the course calendar (lectures, labs, homework, exams), external events (seminars, meetings, office hours) and work produced by the course participants (student assignments, professors' comments, blogs, wikis and group projects). We used course data from two four-month degree programs that taught biology students about computer programming. Three professors identified how key features of StreamLiner would help both students and professors and suggested additional ideas for improvement. We argue that the StreamLiner approach offers a new way of managing diverse course data and can act as a general-purpose, interactive, course-visualization tool.