<![CDATA[In higher education, the design of academic curricula presents significant challenges, particularly in ensuring balanced workloads across semesters. Unbalanced course schedules can lead to student fatigue, decreased academic performance, and elevated dropout rates, especially in demanding fields such as mechanical engineering, where courses vary widely in difficulty and prerequisites. Traditional approaches to course planning, often reliant on manual allocation by academic advisors, are inefficient and error-prone, failing to systematically address constraints such as prerequisite dependencies, credit hour limits, and semester-specific availability. This study introduces the Open-Registration Planning Network (OPLANNER), an innovative graphical user interface (GUI)-driven optimization tool that leverages the Tiki Taka Algorithm (TTA), a sport-inspired metaheuristic, to optimize course planning. The tool offers both default and customized planning modes, enabling users to input student information and preferences for subjects such as mathematics or physics, which dynamically adjust course difficulty weights. In a case study on a 55-course mechanical engineering curriculum, OPLANNER achieved balance efficiencies of up to 95 %, demonstrating effective workload distribution compared to manual planning approaches. This study contributes to a practical, user-accessible system that enhances educational planning, fostering more equitable and effective learning experiences in engineering programmes.]]>
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