My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.
Or any inept or incompetent administrator who feels his or her position is threatened by this demonstration of a superior solution to what seems to be a widely faced problem.
Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
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Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#12My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rathe…
I had the thought, but not the hangover and subsequent willpower. Made a half-hearted attempt with Semantic MediaWiki.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#13My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.
Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#14My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.
Or any inept or incompetent administrator who feels his or her position is threatened by this demonstration of a superior solution to what seems to be a widely faced problem.
This is so common even among mid managers in almost every big company I've known.
Ensure you kill innovation with any and every means you can, else the programmers will look smarter than you.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#15Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own personal views, nothing more), but the main takeaway is as with most problems, the core issue is not technology, it's politics.
Students who have these "we could change the world!" ideas rarely understand that they're not the first person to think of idea X, and that the issue is who you know who can pull the right strings.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#16Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.)
It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely).
Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions.
Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well.
Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :).
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#17Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#18Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.) It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes,…
Berkeley's also trying to expose more things via an API: https://developer.berkeley.edu/ (it was primitive last time I tried it, but still a nice initiative to prevent the scraping that most sites have to resort to right now)
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#19I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university with a reputation for engineering can be.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#20My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rathe…
Second year University of Hull compsci student here, would just like to thank you for this - it's so much more efficient to use than the official intranet version.