Problem Statement
Students at the
UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) want
and need to exchange information with each other about courses offered
at SIMS and other courses offered at Berkeley that are relevant to the
SIMS program.
Information about
the experiences of other students can be crucial to making good choices
about what courses to take. The
desired information includes overall opinions about the courses and
instructors, as well as information on the course difficulty and work
load. While
students who are planning what courses to take have a need for this
information, students who have completed courses often have a strong
desire to express their opinions.
Right now, this
exchange of information happens informally through email or face-to-face
interactions. However, this tends to limit each student's sources of
information to their immediate circle of friends. It also means that
historical data is lost, since the ideas and opinions of previous students
are not recorded.
Solution
The SIMians Course
Comment Forum (CoCoFo) is a web-based forum that provides information
on courses of interest to SIMS students. It allows students to rate
and comment on courses that they have taken, and to view the ratings
and comments entered by other students. In addition, it provides mechanisms
to find courses on specific topics or taught by specific instructors.
The following pages
describe the CoCoFo design and its development:
Use the link below
to access the latest CoCoFo prototype:
Note:
The prototype works best in Netscape browers.
Note that
the material submitted as IS213 class assignments can currently still
be accessed; however, if these pages are archived to another location,
some of this material may become inaccessable due to hard-coded path
names in links:
Links
to previous material