2006 / September 9th/ The train that Web 2.0 missed: Part 1 of 3
With all the craze of Web 2.0 and user-centric web applications that bring together user-generated content and community, there’s a major niche that application developers have missed alltogether. It’s educational software, and it’s in bad need of repair. The largest potential for improvement right now is class enrollment software.
The purpose
The purpose of class enrollment software is to aid students in registering for classes. The continual problem of universities in the United States (especially in California over the past 3 years) is that there are too little classes offered, and too many students wanting to register for classes. Registering for classes is an intensely confusing and stressful activity — it’s something that can overwhelm new college freshman.
Which classes to take?
The first obstacle is to figure out which classes to take. When you’re a freshman, you’re assaulted with a mountain of classes to take. You’ve got around 60 classes you need to take over a 5 year period; some classes have pre-requisites; some classes have co-requisites; some classes have class-standing requirements; some classes have declared major requirements. On top of that, there are specific classes required to graduate as well as larger bucket requirements (such as a Literature requirement) that can be met by several dozen specific classes.
When to take them?
The next decision is when to take the classes you’d like to take. Do you want classes in the morning? Afternoon? Evening? Split up throughout the day? All lumped together? Things only get more complicated when you have a part-time job that also takes up part of your day.
Who to take them with?
Now you need to decide which teachers to take for each of your classes. Luckily for Cal Poly, some smart students built an awesome application a few years ago called Polyratings (this is not sanctioned by the university). This site collects ratings and reviews of teachers by actual students.
So, let’s get this straight. At any given time there are thousands of combinations of classes, time slots, and teachers to choose from. To make this more complicated, there are roughly 15,000 people registering for these classes over a week in chunks of about 1,000 people at a time — meaning the availability of these classes changes by the second.
This is really complicated and confusing.
An application to solve the complexity
We’ve got thousands of people attempting to interact with a large database of ever-changing information all at the same time. The interaction between this information will determine their schedule for the next ten weeks of their life, as well as their ability to graduate on-time. The answer seems pretty clear: we need an application to solve the complexity.
This is exactly what Cal Poly did several years ago with an application called POWER (POly WEb Registration). This system worked sufficiently, but was in bad need of an upgrade. This year we got our upgrade with PASS (Plan a Student Schedule). This year we got our upgrade with CPReg.
No, I didn’t stutter, we now have two applications to register for classes. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
Until next time
Originally I had intended to include a description of how to use PASS and CPReg in this post, but it quickly became abundantly clear that this would have resulted in The Longest Post Ever™. So, stay tuned for a few days — I’m busy writing out a post on the absurdity of the current registration process.
Further reading: The train that Web 2.0 missed: Part 2 of 3
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All my little projects that I leave scattered around the web. Some for profit, all for fun.
September 9th | #
An interesting post - I actually developed an AJAX-based scheduling system for students to use, about two years ago. It’s a completely web-based application and doesn’t require any reloads of any sort, while still providing the full computation power of the standard application (which I also developed). They’re both wildly popular, and I suspect that most technical universities have some system like this, in one way or another. I’m interested to see what Cal Poly has, in your upcoming posts.
September 10th | #
I completely agree. At my university (in Australia) class enrollment is so complicated they run classes during orientation week to teach people how to enrol.
September 13th | #
Jim: which uni?
UNSW’s got a pretty good system going with MyUNSW…
September 14th | #
[...] Disclaimer: I’m talking about the fairly large population of teachers who are intimidated by technology. Frankly, I don’t blame them: Most school software is horribly designed. [...]
September 15th | #
My university has a very complicated and I believe inherintly evil registration program. There are actually classes offered constantly throughout the semester to teach users how to use the program that will get you to the registration program. I wish we not only had an easier program to use, but use one that is more aesthetically pleasing.
John, I love the system that you have. Very easy to use. I had fun playing around with it.
September 15th | #
I have thought about this exact topic SO many times. Every person that I have talked to that is enrolled in college says the same thing: the enrollment process is slow, clunky, hard to use, and confusing. I could post screen shots of my school’s (jwu.edu) software (called UConnect, how clever!). I think it is some customized off the shelf software.
I am hoping to do my senior technical solo project on this issue, because I think it is a severe need. The problem is that enrollment (currently, at least) IS a confusing transaction. It’s cumbersome by nature. Not only are there thousands of classes to register for, but there are dozens of classes that you need to take before you can even think about taking a higher level course. There are a lot of layers of complication that need to be addressed.
I think the problem CAN be overcome (we’ve landed a man on the moon, blah blah blah) but it’s not as easy as it seems at first glance. An interesting topic, none the less.
September 28th | #
[...] Kyle Neath is a web developer and student at Cal Poly and he talks about the red-headed step child of the Web 2.0 movement. Seriously people, if you took a good hard look around the web you’ll see almost everything has a Web 2.0 counterpart. Neath refers to the enrollment applications specifically, but what about ONLINE COURSES? The crap that’s out there now is awful. Web 2.0 needs to take a glance in that direction as well. [...]
September 29th | #
whassup Kyle, long time :)
I remember my first semester (Univ. Central Florida) where we had to register OVER THE PHONE with some horrible automated system. The online system after that was pretty easy. Slap in the prefix (e.g. CS for computer science) and /or ID code for a class, and it would spit out in a nice table all of the relevant info:
total class size, spots taken, spots available, professor, class schedule, spots held for overflow and whatnot. It was a live system, so if your friend registered and you refreshed the page, it would show the spot taken up.
IIRC, it would always warn you about what the pre-reqs were for a class. On the printouts you would get each year that told you when you could start registering, as well as what classes you had taken (w/ the grade) and what you still needed, it would have a check or an x next to each class telling you if you had all of the pre-reqs for it. It had its bugs here and there, but worked faily well. Keep in mind we started using this in 1998, somewhat high tech back then I guess. Damn… 1998… I am so damn old… :)
May 18th | #
[...] Disclaimer: I’m talking about the fairly large population of teachers who are intimidated by technology. Frankly, I don’t blame them: Most school software is horribly designed. [...]