Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
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Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#2This is nothing new. Since course registration has had a web interface, there have been those who find the system clunky, inefficient, and useless for a wide array of situations, the least of which is registering for classes. I know at least 3 people in my grade level who have done the same thing. I've done the same thing. People before me have told me how they did the same thing. This is all at one university. The NYTimes is making these guys out to be heroes of programming and ingenuity, when this is almost a first step for a college/university programmer.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#3It's always encouraging to hear about schools like Stanford and Berkeley that are actually supportive of student-run initiatives like these. I just graduated from McGill University, and throughout most of my undergrad I was one of the admins of a website (wikinotes.ca) for sharing notes and other student-created course materials. We got little to no support from the administration, despite attempts at reaching out, and the only reason we knew that they heard about us was a mass email - filled with misinformation - sent out to profs warning them about us.
I know McGill's infamous for being especially bureaucratic, but it can't be impossible to get their support. Those who got their school's administration to support their project, what did you build and how did you do it?
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#4I actually really enjoyed the article, and can relate: about a month ago, I started building openYorkU, a RESTful API for York University, because their data was not in any accessible format, and was just listed (in a .pdf). I thought student-made apps would work much better, and I should work on something all students can use.
Some examples of why it's useful; when looking for courses - there wasn't any way of searching. I couldn't just look for all first year courses, that are 3 credits, and in courses A, B, and C. I also couldn't find all the restaurants, still open beside me that serve coffee (all the data York provided was on a .pdf). With an API, this stuff is simple.
It's still a work in progress, and I haven't had much time to work on it lately, but if you're interested in checking it out: https://github.com/mlisbit/openYorkU-API . This article definitely encouraged me to continue on with the project. More Universities should have open data like University of Waterloo.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#5I wonder if any of these systems are accessible to the disabled. If your awesome mobile app to grab classes means that blind or motor-impaired students lose access, is that really an improvement?
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#6I wonder if any of these systems are accessible to the disabled. If your awesome mobile app to grab classes means that blind or motor-impaired students lose access, is that really an improvement?
To be fair, the original systems often are not very accessible for the disabled. My university uses peoplesoft and it's a steaming piece of shit. The blind/impaired are better off contacting the undergraduate office/registrar, which they often do (it is so much easier).
So I guess that in a sense, everyone is wrong.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#7I actually really enjoyed the article, and can relate: about a month ago, I started building openYorkU, a RESTful API for York University, because their data was not in any accessible format, and was just listed (in a .pdf). I thought student-made apps would work much better, and I should work on something all students can use. Some examples of why it's useful; when looking for courses - there wasn't any way of searc…
Waterloo has open data now?
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#8This is nothing new. Since course registration has had a web interface, there have been those who find the system clunky, inefficient, and useless for a wide array of situations, the least of which is registering for classes. I know at least 3 people in my grade level who have done the same thing. I've done the same thing. People before me have told me how they did the same thing. This is all at one university. The N…
Did they share the program with other people? Why did 6+ people all rewrite the same program? Or did they have different specific uses?
From the first example of the article, it says that within the time span of one semester there were 8000 students who had used the software. In another example, the site used to compare courses at Berkeley now has over 50,000 registered users. Berkeley even paid them for the website afterwards because of the value they saw in it. They all produced something that lots of students use to solve problems/increase efficiency in academic life. That's not a trivial thing to do.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#9I actually had a lot of luck creating such a timetable website[0] for NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Initial version did hacky scraping, eventually I found a database, after the site site gained traction the IME Faculty (IT, Maths, Electrical engineering) got in touch about the site.
At this point they actually paid me to opensource the code and hired me to setup a copy for them. We never got their version to take off, as mine was to well established. So eventually we shut their instance down, and mine lives happily on despite the fact that I've long since left the university.
IME also did some great follow up putting quite a bit of effort in creating an API for "me". The problem was that the central IT services could only provide payed access to their WSDL based XML service. So IME basically payed them for access and then reexported it with their own API[1] + caching.
On a side note, most of the code[2], except for the importers should be generic enough to use at other schools :-)
[0]: http://ntnu.1024.no/ or http://ntnu.1024.no/2014/fall/adamcik/35/ for a sample timetable
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#10I wonder if any of these systems are accessible to the disabled. If your awesome mobile app to grab classes means that blind or motor-impaired students lose access, is that really an improvement?
To be fair, the original systems often are not very accessible for the disabled. My university uses peoplesoft and it's a steaming piece of shit. The blind/impaired are better off contacting the undergraduate office/registrar, which they often do (it is so much easier). So I guess that in a sense, everyone is wrong.
Interesting. I work at the University of California, and accessibility is a required element of any new campus-wide system. Many legacy systems lack accessibility, but that doesn't mean we don't improve them when new stuff comes out.
We do have a Disabled Students program, which provides a lot of help, but which is also expensive for the university.