The Path to CU Reviews
Cornell has thousands of students on campus, most of whom dread figuring out which of the hundreds of classes to take. From our team’s own experiences, we knew that the course enroll process is an extremely subjective and opaque endeavor . The only way to tell if a particular class is relevant, interesting, or even worth the time is by asking someone who has taken the class before. This simply isn’t feasible for the twenty-something classes you have to take, let alone other intriguing opportunities in other majors. Our problem was to make searching for classes easier for undergraduates by aggregating the most important data about classes, especially student-provided feedback, in one place
Project Feasibility and User Research:
We asked students to tell us how they decided on what classes they were going to take for the next semester. From a survey of almost 200 students, the following is an in-exhaustive list of sources that students used to make their decision:
- Classes suggested by friends
- Class Roster
- Major requirements
- Advisor recommendation
- RateMyProfessor
Next, we tried to understand what factors influence class decisions. To bring clarity to this challenging issue, we needed to present the most helpful data for students, and validate that users wanted this information. The following is an in-exhaustive list of things that students would like to know about when it came to enrolling in their classes:
- Syllabus
- Course materials needed
- Student feedback
- Difficulty/time commitment
- Class size/popularity
- Median class grades
- How the class is run
- Previous course evaluations
It was evident that students spent a lot of time thinking about their classes to make sure that it was the perfect class for them at the perfect time.
The key takeaways from our user interviews were:
- Students use many different resources to gain information about different aspects of a class and would appreciate it if there was a place that consolidated the various factors that affected their decisions.
- Students prioritize student feedback. They want to know what other people who have taken the class have to say about it. However, this feedback needed to be genuine and relevant, unlike extremely negative spam reviews on other sites.
- The voluntary participation from the students in course evaluations or crowd-sourced sites like RateMyProfessor tends to be low. Accordingly, students need external motivation to participate.
Convinced we were not crazy, we took the idea back to the drawing board….
Design Brainstorming
Cornell’s class roster is present at classes.cornell.edu and is the go-to location for students to find course information like class descriptions and schedules. We explored the possibility of creating a site integration with classes.cornell.edu given our shared goal of informing students about classes.
However, due to conflicts with the university software, we were unable to pursue the integration. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since we would be able to create the platform from the ground up, giving us more creative control over the product and audience.
Market Research
To understand how we could go about helping students find classes we decided to look for other universities that also had similar problem and what they did to resolve them. We came across Harvard’s CS50 Courses, Berkeley’s Berkeley Time, Penn’s Course Review , Brown’s The Critical Review and many more. It was evident that all sites were out to solve similar problems, but it was encouraging to see so many different approached to the issue.
Brainstorming Continued
We went back to our user research and focused on what problem we were trying to solve. From the requirements, we stipulated what information students wanted to know the most and decided to design for that. This information was as follows:
- Class Metrics
- Difficulty
- Median grades
- Attendance policy
- Overall quality
2. Student Reviews
- Student opinion about the class
- Class quality
- Difficulty
3. Department Guides
- Visual representation of major requirements
- Intuitive way to check prerequisites
Given these functional requirements, and the existing way that students currently look for classes, it made the most sense to portray class information in a web application that Cornell students can access and contribute to.
Mockups
From the very beginning, the team has been extremely excited by the prospect of visual representation of classes. The early prototypes of the website used this idea to portray a graph of classes in a particular department. Each node was a class and each edge represented the path as a prerequisite or possible next class, depending on the position of the corresponding node in space.
While the graph was an extremely exciting idea, we quickly realized the development time would make the feature unwise to implement in a minimum viable product (MVP). We decided that a university-wide forum for aggregating class data was a priority, and we should save the graph view for a future update. The MVP would share the most valued class data from our research, and provide an outlet for students to read and view student feedback. Specifically, the panel view was optimized to take advantage of the full screen, but the setup laid a foundation for future updates.
