  This article advances the prerequisite network as a means to visualize the
hidden structure in an academic curriculum. Network technologies have been used
for some time now in social analyses and more recently in biology in the areas
of genomics and systems biology. Here I treat the curriculum as a complex
system with nodes representing courses and links between nodes the course
prerequisites as readily obtained from a course catalogue. The resulting
curriculum prerequisite network can be rendered as a directed acyclic graph,
which has certain desirable analytical features. The curriculum is seen as
partitioned into numerous isolated course groupings, the size of the groups
varying considerably. Individual courses are seen serving very different roles
in the overall organization, such as information sources, hubs, and bridges.
This network represents the intrinsic, hard-wired constraints on the flow of
information in a curriculum, and is the organizational context within which
learning occurs.
