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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

#71

Post by annnnd »

krilnon wrote: post #24
orf wrote: 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…

> Could be a market opportunity. Perhaps, although I've heard that universities typically (however unfortunate it may be) like to buy huge ERP installations that cost millions but include integrated timetabling / scheduling.

Then I guess it IS a market opportunity. :)

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

#72

Post by theorique »

alan_cx wrote: post #67
acangiano wrote: post #2

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

Ego. In my experience, most problems come down to ego.

Absolutely.

Consider the Assistant Deputy VP for Administrative Affairs who just got sold an official $20M "Enterprise Scale" solution for course registration that worked about as well as healthcare.gov, and a kid comes along and in a couple of weekends, makes something that works better and has more features.

Now the 'unofficial' solution is getting more and more popular and your gold-plated turd of a system that you staked millions of dollars of Official University Budget on is getting mocked mercilessly by the student body.

What do you do?

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

#73

Post by theorique »

michaelt wrote: post #49
arkinus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the problem with graduate students having access?

Anything in the institution that the bureaucracy does not control completely, represents a "problem" to the bureaucracy.

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

#74

Post by PierreMage »

creatio wrote: post #54
tikhonj wrote: post #16

Some 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,…

How would one start to begin making such an scheduling algorithm? I'm asking for learning purposes. What should I be reading? Or their resources for basic such things...

You can take a look at Discrete Optimization course on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/optimization

The next session will start March 4th 2014.

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

#75

Post by logicchains »

mgkimsal wrote: post #15

Not 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 p…

At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.

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

#76

Post by raverbashing »

creatio wrote: post #54
tikhonj wrote: post #16

Some 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,…

How would one start to begin making such an scheduling algorithm? I'm asking for learning purposes. What should I be reading? Or their resources for basic such things...

This can be modelled using MIP (Mixed Integer Programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_integer_programming#Integ...

Probably not the best way but it's doable. In fact one of the exercises of the class I took was similar to that (matching Professors to Classes with their constraints and class constraints)

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

#77

Post by mattgibson »

acangiano wrote: post #2

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

I write software for universities and have many experiences that confirm this. It need not necessarily be direct negative reviews, but the perception of power leaving the building or the hands of those who currently wield it. Universities do not normally face the same commercial pressures internally that a company would, so academics often don't take well to it.

Shitty software that management chose themselves and can control is always seen as a better option than letting students run the place.

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

#78

Post by 72deluxe »

Jake232 wrote: post #20
orf wrote: 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…

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.

Very interesting! It is a Scientia product. I used to work for a competitor.

More coming soon....

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

#80

Post by thetwiceler »

Let's not blow this out of proportion. They scraped private data (that required a Yale login) without permission and accidentally made it available to a wider audience than intended.

Yale has historically been very supportive of these things. A couple of years ago, they acquired another very slick course catalog website, Yale Bluebook, for a good chunk of money [1].

[1] http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-acquires...

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