What happened:
The course review was hard to use, and sometimes it was misleading.
So what:
The team of 11 is making a course review system for APU.
Now what:
They will launch the website soon. *Update: they launched their website: https://heycollege.herokuapp.com/ go below for more outlets
Choosing the right courses during the course registration is crucial to academic life in university. Few successful clicks can bring a smile and frown for the opposite case. But before taking the actual course, how can we be sure to smile or frown? The answer comes from the course review.
One of the most popular ways for APU students is to utilize the Facebook group called APU course review. In that group, people are searching for previous reviews and asking for review themselves. However, sometimes looking into course reviews from this Facebook group doesn't really help because it is not as accurate as it is expected to be. One of the biggest issues is that most of the reviews are unsorted and separated. It's hard to get the course's overall review as separated reviews are in the comment section in an ununiformed way. Difficulties in getting overall reviews lead to only a few biased opinions, and maybe that is why sometimes there is a gap between the review and actual classes.
Masaki Koga, a 3rd-year student majoring in APM, had a similar experience where he found himself in trouble because of not having a proper course review. He recalled some classes turned out to be useless and some others underrated. This experience made him think he wanted to do something about it at the back of his mind.
Last November, Masaki decided to apply for the EDGE NEXT program (Exploration and Development of Global Entrepreneurship for NEXT generation) held by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, 文部科学省). Part of this program offered an entrepreneurship boot camp at Kyushu University. At the program, Masaki shared his ideas to make a social network system for universities and found people with similar ideas.
From this point, they have gathered more talents for market research and programming. With the mission of supporting students with the internet, they have been working on the course review system for APU. This team of 11 wanting to provide better university life for others consists of 5 from Osaka University, 2 from Ritsumeikan University, 3 from APU, and 1 from Beppu university. Their motivation is to learn or improve their skills via this project. Their vision is to provide college students with useful information and improve college education in Japan via web service.
Their new system offers better facilitation for course review. Reviews are quantified, sorted, and intuitive.
Even with the current COVID situation and limitations as college students, they manage to overcome challenges and create an output. Their goal is to break the information barrier between students and universities.
They will launch their web service end of this month. *Websites and outlets: Website:
https://heycollege.herokuapp.com/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Hey-College-113685124100530/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hey.college/?hl=en