EdPlanner

Built 2019 · Status Retired · Stack Laravel 5.8, PHP 7.1, Laravel Spark 8, Laravel Nova 2, MySQL, GoJS

EdPlanner was a web application for building an education plan, the ordered sequence of courses that takes a student from where they are to a degree or a career goal, and for publishing that plan so other students could start from it. I built it as my graduate capstone at the Harvard Extension School.

Purpose

I built it because I was the user. As a student at the Harvard Extension School I spent countless hours deciding which courses to take and in what order. The catalog told me what was offered. It did not tell me which sequence would get me to the thing I actually wanted, and it did not tell me what the students ahead of me had learned the hard way. I had already planned around one course that was withdrawn before I could take it.

Every student in a program did that same work, from scratch, every term, and then threw it away. Someone in my program had almost certainly already solved the problem I was sitting with, and there was no way for me to see their answer.

What it did

A student created an ed plan as a sequence of courses tied to an academic or career goal, and could then publish it. Published plans were browsable, so a student starting out could find someone with a similar goal and begin from that person's plan rather than from an empty page, editing it to fit their own situation instead of assembling it from the catalog.

The design bet was crowdsourcing. One plan was one student's opinion, but as more students published plans the set would start to show which sequences people actually took and which course combinations recurred. The flip side is that a resource like that is worth very little on day one and only pays off once enough people have contributed, which is the real weakness of the model and the problem any production version would have had to solve first.

It was a working application rather than a mockup. It ran on Laravel, was deployed on a subdomain of my college.technology site, and was loaded with real college and course data, with browsable pages for individual colleges, individual courses, and individual plans.

Features

Ed plan builder, a plan assembled as an ordered sequence of courses tied to an academic or career goal.
Publishing, a finished plan made public so other students could see it.
Plan browsing, published plans from students with similar goals, usable as a starting point instead of a blank page.
Real college and course data, loaded into the application, with pages for individual colleges, individual courses, and individual plans.

Impact

Small, and I am not going to dress it up. It was a capstone prototype: built, deployed on its own subdomain, and populated with real course data. It never went past the prototype stage, I have no usage figures for it, and it did not outlive the degree. The idea it was testing, that the planning work students already do privately could be pooled instead of repeated, is the part I would still argue for.