Syllabuddy

Welcome to Syllabuddy!

Prototype link

Describe your project (max 150 words)

You ever toss your college course syllabus without even looking at it? Alternatively, do you waste days memorizing all the exam dates, grading policies, and more? A deeply relevant problem, then: how can we make syllabi more digestible for students?

Thus, we created a web app to summarize syllabus information in a centralized, personalized way. Export important actionable items (like exams and assignments) to Google Calendar and Notion. Browse other courses at your school on a Community Tab. Break down each important morsel of information into separate pages and carefully designed widgets. And ask the AI directly for answers when you forget.

The result: a dead simple reference that users can come back to again and again throughout the semester. Forgot your exam date? Want to know what happens if you forget to take it? Oops – should I just drop the course? Just ask your Syllabuddy!

Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

We conducted research across 5 campuses and 3 college campus organizations using a Google Form with questions regarding students' syllabus use. First we collected basic information about our students, like their year, school, and major to get a better idea of who we were designing for. While the majority were Cornell students, we got a relatively even spread of students across different years. The majority of people taking our survey were also majoring in Computer Science and related fields. We then asked students what the most important thing on a syllabus is to them, and the most common answers we got were: office hours, exams, assignments, grading scheme, course textbooks, class policies, and course topics. We also asked them what their biggest issue was when dealing with a syllabus is, and the general consensus was that they’re too long! Our research indicates that roughly 50% of students refer to their syllabus less than 5 times a semester, and about 52% of students don’t even read through the entire syllabus all the time. For students who did go through the entire syllabus, their issue with the syllabus is that it took so long to extract the important information they wanted. We also asked students where they most commonly viewed a class syllabus and the majority said they used a laptop. What we also noticed throughout was a pattern of using calendars or taking note of dates/incorporating these notes into another place. Many of them took notes of dates for actionable items like office hours, assignments, and exams, so we decided to include a feature that could sync all this to your calendar. Ultimately, our design goal, then, was to distill the long-form text content of a syllabus into approachable “widgets” that could be categorized in forms useful to the user as per the findings above.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

To create a more personalized view of your syllabus, we gave users the option to choose four of the most useful pieces of information they grab from a syllabus to view on the course syllabus overview our app provides. Then, users can view detailed forms of this content in tabs rather than as one long scrollable text area. Sub-categories such as Actionables (with views that informs you as to how many days before a deadline) and Policies further work to directly anticipate and meet user needs head-on, with expanded details about all the syllabi minutiae. The goal: make it really easy to get the information you want at a glance, and make all the available information easily accessible with just a click – a vast improvement over memorization and Ctrl+F.

Users can also ask an AI trained on the contents of the chosen class syllabus. “Are there office hours on Monday?” or “Who’s the Head TA?” are examples of questions that our Syllabuddy AI can easily answer. With the Syllabuddy AI, there’s no need to even search the syllabus for information you need – just enter your user need directly! Depending on the nature of the answer, the Syllabuddy AI will surface the relevant part of the syllabus, or answer your query inline!

With direct integrations with publishing the found Actionables to Google Calendar, as well as to upload an entire syllabus summary to Notion, we also integrate with existing user flows for maximum ease-of-use and virality. Our goal: to enable enhancements of existing user flows, not to force breaking users into new habits.

On that same note, a Drag and Drop interface to instantly update or generate a new class based on any provided Syllabus file (whether a PDF, a text file, or even a screenshot of your PDF) works auto-magically!

And finally, a centralized Community of course syllabi associated with the institution with which you signed into Syllabuddy lets you browse other course syllabi besides those that you are enrolled in, so that you know what you’re missing out on and whether to switch classes, without all the commitment! And with one click, you can add such a class to your library too.