CourseOutlook

Review Panel of CourseOutlook

Inspiration

Coming from personal experience, looking for course reviews is hard. Usually, we would have to search for classes on SPIRE, then go onto Reddit/Rate My Professor or ask around to get more insights on classes we want to register. Information on those sites is not always precise or verified and may sometimes be biased (or hateful!). It would also take a lot of time to find the desired information.

This could be a hassle for students, therefore we wanted to build something to fix it. We believe that students should have access to accurate, fair, and unbiased insights on courses and classes, at a button's click.

We believe that this app would set the way and become an example of fostering a community where students provide help and insights to one another.

What it does

The page provides information about courses. Users can click on a course and see its description and other users' reviews and the course's questions/answers forum. Users can also leave reviews for courses that they have taken, as well as ask or answer any question about any class.

How we built it

We used React to build an interactive web page. We used MongoDB as our database and used Javascript to handle server-side logic. We used data from UMass' official pages on courses

Challenges we ran into

Time constraints, very few APIs available from UMass

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to collaborate and work on something that we believe to be helpful and beneficial to other students.

What we learned

Building a product within a limited timeframe while also having fun with peers.

What's next for CourseOutlook

We want to expand this project to support all courses at UMass, and later support all schools. Utilize AI and ML to detect spam, hate, and toxic posts/comments. Upvote/downvote and karma systems to increase credibility for reviews and comments (inspired by Reddit and Stackoverflow).