Vaibhav Verma was frustrated that he could not get into the most popular courses at Rutgers University, so he decided a new approach. He built a web-based application that could repeatedly query the New Jersey university's registration system. As soon as anyone dropped the class, Verma's tool would send him a message, and he would grab the open spot. "I built it just because I was a little bit bored," he said. By the next semester, 8,000 people had used it.
At Brown University, Jonah Kagan had a clever idea of his own: Get his fellow students to name three favourite courses, and use the results as a guide for people seeking unusual electives. Building the website was easy, but he could not persuade Brown to give him enrollment figures, which would have allowed him to control for differences in class size. So the survey died.
Such experiences are becoming common at campuses around the United States, as students are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, and generally just versions of the information systems at the heart of under graduate life. But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.
Last year 19 students at Baruch College in New York used a computer script to check for openings in crowded courses at such high frequency that they nearly took down not just Baruch's computer system but also that of the entire City University of New York. On the other hand, the scheduling app that two students of University of California, Berkeley, devised worked so well that the administrators decided to adapt it.
To some extent, the tension reflects a basic difference in worldview. "Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can," said Harry R Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard's computer science department, "since bureaucracies tend to have priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is useful. I know this well, as students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven years before Zuckerberg just did it without asking."
Alex Sydell and William Li collaborated on a website, Ninja Courses, that made it easy for fellow students at Berkeley, and later at four more UC campuses, to compare every aspect of different courses. Many campus developers say the next frontier is for more colleges to get comfortable releasing their information not case by case, but in uniform formats known as application programming interfaces. "It turns out if you give students that power they'll do some pretty great things with it," said Alexey Komissarouk, who started a student group called PennApps while at the University of Pennsylvania.
It has done some pretty great things for the students, too. Quispe now works at Google.
Kagan works at Clever, an educational startup that assembles student data from K-12 schools around the country. Li is still running Ninja Courses. And Sydell works at DropBox.
At Brown University, Jonah Kagan had a clever idea of his own: Get his fellow students to name three favourite courses, and use the results as a guide for people seeking unusual electives. Building the website was easy, but he could not persuade Brown to give him enrollment figures, which would have allowed him to control for differences in class size. So the survey died.
Such experiences are becoming common at campuses around the United States, as students are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, and generally just versions of the information systems at the heart of under graduate life. But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.
Last year 19 students at Baruch College in New York used a computer script to check for openings in crowded courses at such high frequency that they nearly took down not just Baruch's computer system but also that of the entire City University of New York. On the other hand, the scheduling app that two students of University of California, Berkeley, devised worked so well that the administrators decided to adapt it.
To some extent, the tension reflects a basic difference in worldview. "Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can," said Harry R Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard's computer science department, "since bureaucracies tend to have priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is useful. I know this well, as students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven years before Zuckerberg just did it without asking."
Alex Sydell and William Li collaborated on a website, Ninja Courses, that made it easy for fellow students at Berkeley, and later at four more UC campuses, to compare every aspect of different courses. Many campus developers say the next frontier is for more colleges to get comfortable releasing their information not case by case, but in uniform formats known as application programming interfaces. "It turns out if you give students that power they'll do some pretty great things with it," said Alexey Komissarouk, who started a student group called PennApps while at the University of Pennsylvania.
It has done some pretty great things for the students, too. Quispe now works at Google.
Kagan works at Clever, an educational startup that assembles student data from K-12 schools around the country. Li is still running Ninja Courses. And Sydell works at DropBox.
Courtesy: The Times of India
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