Coursicle, an online service that allows college students to easily browse classes and plan their class schedule, has just launched at Smith College (https://www.coursicle.com/smith/). Created by Joe Puccio, a 2016 graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, and Tara Aida, a Harvard alumna of 2016, Coursicle started at UNC Chapel Hill in 2012 and has grown to support over 450 colleges. The Sophian interviewed Puccio to learn how the app works.
What is its background?
When I was an incoming first-year at UNC, I spent several hours trying to plan out my class schedule, and then when I finally went to register for my classes I got into only one of the five I needed to take. So that night, I started working on a program that would text me when a class I wanted had an available seat. One of my friends suggested opening it up to other students, and at the end of the registration period about 900 students had signed-up. The next semester, 1800 students had signed up, and it just kept growing by word of mouth.
A few months later, my co-founder Tara suggested we try to solve the other side of registration: the arduous process of figuring out what classes to take and trying to fit them all into a non-overlapping schedule. Part of the reason this task is so arduous is because the software the university provides to search for classes is usually very outdated and tedious to use. So Coursicle really came out of a pain that we as well as our friends were experiencing while we were students. Due to increased demand for our text service last semester (we started sending so many texts Verizon started blocking us), we had to switch over to an iOS and Android app to do notifications.
How does Coursicle work?
We’ve written scripts that extract all the course data from Smith’s public listing of courses. We then present the course data in a much nicer format on Coursicle. Students can go to https://www.coursicle.com/smith/ and use the search fields on the left-hand side of the page to filter down classes by subject, title, days, time, requirement and more. When they find a class they’re interested in, they can click on the star in the upper right-hand corner of the class to add it to one of their saved schedules. They can navigate to the calendar view at any time to see what their weekly schedule would look like, and narrow in on a final schedule by removing classes that conflict. We also allow a Facebook login, which allows students to see what classes their friends are planning in real-time. A cool feature Coursicle has is that when students are browsing for classes, they can turn on the “Fade conflicts with my schedule” icon to fade the classes that time-conflict with a class they already have planned on their schedule. We also offer an iOS and Android app which allows students to receive notifications as soon as a class they need to take has an available seat.
How often does the course catalog get updated?
For the majority of the year, changes to courses are added daily. During periods of low volume (when students aren’t planning their schedule), however, our course information may be updated less frequently.
