Comments on: University course finders suck

By: bgrggfe

bgrggfe — Sat, 26 May 2012 02:08:00 +0000

Worldwide more than $100 billion worth of counterfeit products, from Louis Vuitton Replica Handbags to Rolex watches, are sold every year. I have developed a great idea, which will allow shoppers to check the authenticity of the product by using their smartphone before they buy the Louis Vuitton Replica. It will add only a fraction of the cost of the product for the manufacturer, who will be more than happy to pay this little extra cost to protect their brand and increase their sales. However, I do not yet have a working prototype, which requires significant investment. I do not know how and who to approach for venture capital funding. I am so confident about the success of this idea that I feel like selling my house and investing in this technology. Your advice will be very much appreciated.

By: Steven Hunter

Steven Hunter — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:16:16 +0000

Hi Paul, I’d be interested in your comments on our newly launched Prospectus at http://www.shu.ac.uk/prospectus. Naturally, the prospectus is the most important and most visited area of our website. So we decided to try and bring all the information that’s vital to the student decision making process directly to where our students visit, rather than leaving users to trying to try and find it across the website. Thanks, Steven.

By: Janet

Janet — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:09:50 +0000

I'm on the case! I hope to be able to give you an example (or a least a pilot project) by Fall 2010... Also,thanks for the great article, Paul!

By: Paul Boag

Paul Boag — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:58:21 +0000

So would I! Unfortunately I do not know of an institution brave enough to do it.

By: Janet

Janet — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:51:07 +0000

Hi, Paul, Have you seen a university website that allows student reviews? I would love to see an working example of this.

By: Piero Tintori

Piero Tintori — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:33:43 +0000

Hi Paul, From you travels around University websites, have you found any that you think are ones worth looking at?

Regards, Piero

By: Lee R Johnson

Lee R Johnson — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:35:29 +0000

I just started a project to promote online courses on the distance education website of the college I work for. So far we have had a couple of instructors come in to produce a promotion video explaining the course in detail, more than its official description, and inviting students to enroll for the upcoming term. The videos were added our blog and embedded in our electronic version of printed schedule. This started when a instructor came to us asking if he could some how promote a course that had never ran due to low enrollment. So we offered to make video and announcement on our homepage. In four days we had it up and a week later he had his minimum enrollment reached.
We are working on developing a formal process for soliciting promo opportunities, reviewing the promo course quality, and production of promo pages and videos. My main job is to integrate these in to our course finder. The blog was quick and easiest way to put it out there for use with HIJAX. This is only one part of improving our existing course finder, which is exactly as you describe it, text and subject oriented. I still many more improvements to introduce before it is student and (proactive) instructor oriented. Interactive course suggestions based on the user certainly needs development, but the cross department organization of college data and security of student information makes this difficult. Social interaction is a required part of online (all) classes and the thought of pushing the social web on a course finder, such as links to ratemyprofessor.com or open course ratting sounds great not just for students to find courses but to promote course and instruction quality. Imagine that public reviews of products and services!
The course finder sucked in 1999 when I started taking classes here and has always been something I wanted to improve but I often lose my inspiration due to intuition process. I’ll stop here before my rant continues. I’m always glad to hear your “working for the edu” outlook and motivation – Thank you, Lee.

By: Dan Zollman

Dan Zollman — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:46:08 +0000

As a college student, I can't agree more. Choosing one elective out of a list of hundreds of courses is difficult, both because it's hard to find one, and because the two-sentence description isn't enough to tell me whether it's the right choice.

But there are a couple other problems which a course finder will have to deal with, but which it could also help fix. These are mostly administrative problems: at the university I'm thinking of, the official course catalog is only published every two years, meaning that if there's a specialized course that has a new topic every semester, the documentation is out of date for one and a half out of every two years. Then, most academic departments, each of whom have their own website, publish their own lists of course descriptions; this would be more up-to-date than the course catalog, but in conflict with the more "official" document. Third, one professor might teach a course for ten years without changing its content, until a new professor takes over the course and overhauls the syllabus. In that situation, the catalog is not necessarily updated to reflect that. (There are good points in the previous comment as well, but that's why a course finder will have to be built to suit the particular university that uses it.)

Obviously, the problems above are the result of inherently slow administrative processes combined with lack of coordination, rather than deficiencies of the current course software. My point is, however, that course software could be an opportunity to address them. The software should engage academic departments and allow them to be responsible for the course information, even if their privileges are more limited than the top-level administrators. There should be a mode of feedback through which department administrators can provide information, keywords, and recommendations for students.

Ultimately, the current course finder is disconnected from the departments that run the courses. In a sense, this is like a marketing department that isn't quite coordinated with the engineering department. This is why student-to-student feedback is not enough, and it's probably why a public rating system could be damaging if it gets out of control.

Thus, the "connection" that good course finding software might add is not only from student to university and student to student, but also from student to academic department.

By: Patrick H, Lauke

Patrick H, Lauke — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:59:17 +0000

A large part of the problem are, no surprise, academics. It's often a miracle if you can get them to even submit more than a few lines of text about a course they're planning to run next semester...let alone get them to really sell the course, make it attractive, and gather up information that could really make a difference to somebody browsing for courses...

The rating issue is also more difficult if you're talking about courses that, potentially, take over a year to actually plan and set up. If a product in an online store gets consistently bad ratings, it's not a huge problem to just dump the toxic stock and restock with something else quickly...not so with courses. There are quality control measures in place, of course, but they're more behind-the-scenes (student satisfaction surveys, course assessments done by outgoing students, etc).

But yes, in general I agree with the overall direction of this article. Nice one.