Tonight I’d like to talk about a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last few months. I’m super excited to see it coming together, and it’s nearly ready to go live.

The application is called RateMyCourses - put simply, it’s a way for University students to explore, rate, and comment on courses they’ve done to help out others. Inspired by such projects as Fix my Street and Fix my Transport, RateMyCourses aims to increase the transparency of quality courses, lecturers, and tertiary education institutes within New Zealand. Over the last few months I’ve been not only building up this application, but also generating the dataset of courses thats at the heart of the application from scratch, pulling course details from all major Universities within New Zealand, including:

  • Auckland University
  • Massey University
  • Waikato University
  • Victoria University of Wellington
  • University of Canterbury
  • Lincoln University
  • Otago University

All up, I’ve got nearly 20,000 courses indexed, from these seven institutions. This is a huge opportunity for students to really engage with each other, with their Universities, and with new entrants. Over time, I’m hoping RateMyCourses will become a valuable tool for course planning, as it uncovers the best courses, institutions, and educators in New Zealand (and, eventually, other countries).

This is just a preliminary post while I polish up some areas, and make sure I’m really happy with things, but I welcome feedback and comments as I move into the launch and adoption phases. I’m planning to launch in the upcoming weeks, and spend the summer with a core group of users ironing out the major issues, before really pushing it at Victoria next year.