“Which professor is best for this class? Is this class going to destroy my GPA? Will the course material interest me?” Thousands of undergrads find themselves asking these questions during a stressful time of the year for many students — class registration. Luckily, the Course Forum, a student-run website, answers these questions and many more.
“We like to think that the culture of the Course Forum is ‘students helping students,’” fourth-year College student and website director Sean Spector said.
Within the last week of scheduling, users logged into the Course Forum 40,000 times.
These users not only depend on the help of their peers to rate and review the classes they’ve taken, but also on the undergraduates who build and maintain the Course Forum.
The website was founded in 2005 by two undergraduates, Jeff Bordogna and Alan Webb. After they graduated, the website remained unmaintained until a few years ago, when the founders reached out to a group of five students and asked them to get involved in the site.
The team began to expand and currently has 18 members working on production and marketing for the site.
This year, the team released version three of the Course Forum. Third-year College student and senior developer Kienan Adams worked on some key features of the new update.
“We don’t have any actual roles,” Adams said. “We’re all developers. We kind of work by [taking on] different features that we want to work on.”
Many of the changes in the new version involved redesigning the website’s layout. Adams worked primarily on updating the course page, which includes all of the class data and reviews.
Additionally, a new browsing method was added which brings out data already included in the website so users can view it. This data includes the average rating of classes, average GPA and average difficulty as well as class descriptions. Users can now search for professors and learn the professor’s average rating as well as view all the classes he or she teaches.
The developers also added a new scheduling feature. This allows students to pick the classes they want to take while the website generates different scheduling options. Students can also choose various preferences such as “No Morning Classes” or “Save Time for Lunch.”
The scheduler is still in its Beta version, which caused the website’s first crash last week when the developers did not anticipate the high levels of data required by the scheduling app’s server. The team fixed the problem, and the site has been running smoothly ever since.
The team is currently working on several new applications for the future, such as a textbook exchange service, to increase site usage and encourage students to visit the Course Forum at other times of the year besides class registration.
“Something that we’ve really been trying to work on is decreasing the seasonality of the site,” Spector said. “We want to make the Course Forum a part of the students’ every week at school.”
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