Rohan Tandon
Stanford CoursefinderÔ - Andrew Meyer
Overview: Andrew’s website serves as a dynamic surrogate to traditional paper course evaluations. By enabling quarter-round evaluation and commenting on specific courses, it will serve as a useful aggregate information service to students deciding what courses to choose, when they should choose them, etc.
Strengths:
à Comprehensive Plans: All three of Andrew’s writing assignments are examples of quality work. They are thoughtful and touch upon many future considerations such as the feasibility of the project given constraints on the technology, student initiative, as well as finances. Furthermore, he addresses many of the potential pitfalls he may encounter in pursuing this project. The business plan is very impressive, and is a clear indication that he has done his research on what the options he has for funding and start-up are. His ideas are expressed clearly and are very well organized.
à Effective Cost-Revenue model and business ethic: The cost break-up of the business plan is effective in that it is forward-looking. What I liked most about this model was that it considered a method of internalizing incentive costs through advertising: having advertisers pay for space in return for offering prizes for participants in CourseFinder.
Challenges:
à Participation: Actually getting students to participate in the forum will be a difficult task, and prizes alone may not be the only way to do it. From my own experience, people don’t like doing course evaluations irrespective of whether they are online or done on paper. In order to circumvent this aversion to writing reviews, the website could serve as a “Stanford Space” for students, as a webpage that not only has forums regarding courses but also serves as an information page for current events on campus, such as guest speakers on campus, upcoming events, important deadlines such as housing draws, add/withdraw dates, etc.
Additionally, with respect to course evaluation, how would one ensure that the forum doesn’t just serve for a place to whine and crib?
à Competition: CourseFinder can present a number of possibilities for students, but there is a risk that it may become like another Axess or Coursework (which has discussion forums). In creating the website, one needs to pay attention to the methods by which this project will differ from its “competition”.
à Honor code and plagiarism: some students may choose to use the forums to give out answers on problem sets, etc. There needs to be a way to monitor that there is no violation of the honor code/fundamental standard on the website.
