USTC Course Review Community's 10th Anniversary: Original Developers Return to Create Course Review Community 2.0
This article is reposted from the “Woke Xiaodao News” WeChat public account
What started as a sudden inspiration, pulling in two friends, officially launched after more than two months, has now existed in Woke for ten years.
“10 years ago,” during the 2015 spring semester course selection, Zhang Jingning, a freshman from the School of Physics, was actively participating in discussions in a QQ group chat.
“Which teacher is good for the compulsory course next semester?
“How is the grading?”
“Are there any interesting elective courses?”
The group chat was a closed ecosystem. Participants usually only received a sentence or two of evaluation from a senior, akin to the blind men feeling an elephant. These fragmented discussions made it difficult to filter out truly valuable information and even harder to preserve it.
Zhang Jingning recalled her experience with online courses (MOOC courses): she learned MOOCs spontaneously and proactively. She could learn about course content, teaching style, course difficulty, etc., in advance, and choose courses based on her interests, preferences, and needs, showing strong initiative in MOOC learning.
Coinciding with Academician Hou Jianguo’s launch of the “Freshman ‘Science and Society’ Seminar” at USTC, Zhang Jingning, along with her friends, Li Bojie and Chang Zhen from the School of Computer Science, developed the USTC Course Review Community to promote the transparency of course information on campus and help students find courses that suit them better.
The project started on March 8, 2015, and released its beta version on May 25, taking more than two months.
As of today (February 17, 2025), the website has been running for 3,566 days, with 14,234 participants contributing 37,176 reviews for 17,431 courses.
Top 10 Course Ratings in USTC Course Review Community
Top 10 Contributors in USTC Course Review Community
Screenshot source: https://icourse.club/
“10 years later,” it’s still Zhang Jingning and Li Bojie, once again taking more than two months, and the Course Review Community 2.0 (Global Version) iCourses.com is online!
The global version of the Course Review Community has currently imported course and professor lists from five American universities: UCSD, UCB, UCI, UCSC, and USC. Each school has its own domain and sub-site, making it convenient for users to write reviews directly.
Since importing university course lists is time-consuming (usually taking a week to import a university’s course information), the website has launched a new feature that allows users to write reviews directly without searching for courses.
This feature will automatically create a course page and “launch” a new university! This means that users can now write reviews for any university and any course on the global version of the Course Review Community, including domestic universities, very conveniently and quickly.
Global Version of Course Review Community
Screenshot source: https://icourses.com/
Zhang Jingning’s personal homepage: https://jenny42.com/
Source of this article: USTC Course Review Community Development Team
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