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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

#41
post #9
post #3

Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!”, or whatever that means).

Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an engaging, captivating manner.

And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a genuine interest in his educational experience.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#42
Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few.

http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25

He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got taken down pretty quickly.

It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#45
post #10

My 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…

ASP.net? What sorcery! My undergrad website was developed in classic ASP. Our version control was copying files to a networked shared folder. For an example of how utterly fucked classic ASP is: it has no API for accessing file uploads. If you code it yourself, it disables all of the rest of the parsing (query string, form variables, ...), which you then also have to code yourself. Not to mention the whole "hasn't be…

Hey bro, come back when you have 4 years classic ASP with IE6 requirement on your back.

The most advanced data structure was a array that you had to re-size by hand. Terrible.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#46
Ah, embracing innovation the British way.

I recall that 6 months before one of those "date the person right next to me" sites picked up in the US, something similar was launched by some students in a UK university (a pretty high-profile one, though I can't remember which one... LSE? Imperial?). Anyway, long story short, the university IT department shut it down on the grounds that it was not appropriate use of IT facilities.

Six months later, the same launched in the US and grew insanely fast.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#47
We used a quite similar tool (although much more MVP) in my business school in France (ESSEC): we would share a google spreadsheet where we would comment and rate our professors and classes. Although the administration knew about it, they wouldn't accept it officially, which is quite disapointing in my opinion. There are more than 10 years of data in there: the link is transmitted to every promotion.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#48
post #42

Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got…

The original site is at (http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#49
post #39
post #5

Why not just limit access to validated students?

Access was in fact limited to validated students. I think the administration was concerned about graduate students and others who weren't authorized having access to the data.

What's the problem with graduate students having access?

At the place I went to graduate school we could view the same info as undergraduates in terms of course timetables and instructor evaluations, and it didn't seem to cause any problems.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#50
With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint.

In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved, I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system.

They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template.

I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.

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