I 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?
Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
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Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#12It'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, a…
Did that mass email get published anywhere?
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#13I go to the University of Michigan, and there is a huge amount of fragmentation in IT services. APIs are out there, but it's tough to know where to go. A group I'm a part of is going to approach the right people to hopefully fix this.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#14The article links to a guidebook[0] of suggestions and best practices that was produced by student devs involved in such projects and who were brought together at a Campus Data Summit organized by GitHub.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#15I've done something similar, although not directly interactive to course registration and classes yet.
My university, West Virginia University, was granted a few hundred million dollars by the US DOT and President Nixon back in the early 1970s to create a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) [0] system that would transport handfuls of students to and from the various campuses and other locations in the city. Built by Boeing and NASA JPL in the 70s, the overall system hasn't seen a large system overhaul since then. Because of that, it tends to go down often during the middle of the day, leaving students stranded at the various stations with no way to get to and from the various campuses for classes.
I, relying heavily on the PRT, built an app that monitors the PRT uptime status and alerts users [1]. This comes in handy all the time as it notifies students that the PRT is down typically before any announcements are ever made at the stations, allowing students to plan transportation ahead of time and catch the correct bus to the campus.
The app made it to my university's news [2], the city's student run newspaper [3], and I've gotten a few hundred users within the first week of operation.
The app is completely free and open source, written in Go [4] for the server logic and Java for the Android client [5]. And it also supports Android wearables and Google Glass. Please feel free to submit pull requests and issues as you see fit, I'm trying to improve the Go component's error handling, http.Client connections, and MongoDB database sessions/connections.
Unrelated to the PRT Status app, I'm planning on making a web app that allows students to register for courses in the view of a calendar. Currently, our registration system kinda sucks in that you have to write out course times and do somewhat intensive planning to make sure your proposed classes don't interfere with other class times. So my idea is to let the students choose the courses they need, and then the service will automatically generate multiple possible schedules in a week calendar view that shows block times and course registration numbers should they choose that schedule configuration.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Trans...
[1]: https://austindizzy.me/prt/
[2]: http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2014/08/15/student-employee-develo...
[3]: http://www.thedaonline.com/news/article_c3405ca8-281b-11e4-8...
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#16The article links to a guidebook[0] of suggestions and best practices that was produced by student devs involved in such projects and who were brought together at a Campus Data Summit organized by GitHub. [0]: http://campusdata.org/guidebook/
[campusdata.org member here] - if you're working on something similar at your school and want to join forces, join the mailing list is at campusdata.org.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#17Ha, that's interesting. I wrote a very similar "sniping" app (for myself not for others) back in 1999. Back then I had a Motorola pager (one of the large-screen fancy ones) and I could receive short messages via email. I wrote a (horribly constructed) Visual Basic app to check the course enrollments and report to me, in near real-time, when a class opened up.
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#18I made a python script to do the similar thing(it actually register the course for user when there is spot) against University of Manitoba's Aurora student system. With modern browser automation tool this can be done easily :)
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#19[deleted]
Re: Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
#20I wrote a book in large part about how Harvard reacted to my student portal in 2003. (Not particularly well.)