Course selection is an arduous process, and with literally hundreds of choices – that is, if you aren’t in engineering and restricted to taking prescribed Complimentary Studies Electives, it can take forever to select a course that you want to take the next term. Although course selections began nearly a month ago, it may still be worthwhile checking out UWflow, a new website that is designed to help with course planning and to check out what your friends have taken.
Students are limited in the amount of resources that are available in order to make an informed choice. You would have to skim over hundreds of course listings to find out what each course is about, which do well in providing descriptions but lack in providing student opinions of the course. In addition, most of the opinions on these courses were passed around through word of mouth, which can be incomplete and inconvenient. Since each course costs lots of dollars, students should probably make the most out of it by selecting the course that best suits their interests.
This is what motivated a group of University of Waterloo students to build a website that collects what everyone thought about a course and put it in one place. The team consists of David Hu, Mack Duan, and Sandy Wu (all of which are in third year Software Engineering), who handle the website development, as well as Terrence Kwok and Shubham Datta (who are fourth year AFM students), who handle the business side of UWflow. According to the team, their aim is to change the way students find out about, track, and plan their courses online by trying to create a social platform where students can share and obtain course information.
Apart from being just another simple rating website, UWflow tries its best to incorporate social networking into it as well. After all, two of the three developers have worked for Facebook in the past. Once a profile is created, and course history is imported, you will be able to see the courses that your Facebook friends have taken and plan on taking in the future. Furthermore, the website’s user interface will seem very familiar since it is very similar to Facebook, for example, instead of ‘mutual friends’ underneath each person’s name is ‘mutual courses’. However, one important thing to note is that, although it incorporates some social networking, it is not actual social networking. No one other than your friends will be able to view your profile and see the courses that you have taken – which applies to you as well.
UWflow was launched this September and as a result some of the current ratings and reviews are taken from anonymous posts on websites such as ratemyprofessor.com. That being said, this may change as the number of users increases. In addition, the website is still undergoing improvements and the development team encourages more feedback from users. In particular, one can expect to see new features soon, such as schedule sharing.
In brief, UWflow looks to have lots of potential as a new innovative method for making course selection decisions. Not to mention, all those cute cat photos that replace all pictures of the professors on the site are cute.
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