Personalized learning User chat
Information System
Information System sources
Personlized learning profile form
Events Manager
Degree plan
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Project Story

Inspiration

At the onset of our studies at CMU-Africa, it was quite a hectic task for new students to craft a degree plan which met all the degree requirements of the course they are taking. When preparing degree plans, we often had to use multiple course catalog tabs and frequently had to rework plans when courses didn’t fully fit program requirements or were later discovered to be unavailable, leading to confusion and losing track of valuable information in segments of the catalog. There was also limited access to information on campus mainly regarding critical issues mainly due to fragmentation of communication channels in the university. A brief needs assessment among a few students revealed these challenges were common and not peculiar to just one or two students. Many also reported difficulties tracking campus events, as announcements were scattered across multiple WhatsApp groups, causing missed opportunities. These observations confirm the existence of a tangible problem within our community that requires an integrated technological solution.

What It Does

CampusLink is an AI-powered platform designed to optimize the campus experience by integrating personalized learning, academic planning, and event management. It consolidates data from the university website, handbooks, and other public sources into a knowledge-based system with an intelligent chat interface that provides cited responses, quick tips, and adaptive follow-ups. The personalized learning component builds a student profile based on learning styles, academic background, and career goals to provide guided learning support. The degree planning feature generates customized semester-by-semester plans aligned with the CMU-Africa course catalog, while the event management module allows students to RSVP, integrate events into their calendars, and set WhatsApp reminders.

How We Built It

CampusLink was developed using Python for backend processes and TypeScript with React for the frontend. It leverages a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework connected to a Pinecone knowledge base containing curated institutional data. The system supports three user profiles which are, administrative, student, and public, each with defined access levels.

Challenges and Accomplishments

Key challenges included coordinating diverse individual ideas to build a coherent system, as well as extracting and structuring web data for the knowledge base. Despite this, the team successfully developed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that received positive feedback during pilot testing, with students confirming its potential to improve academic planning and information access.

What’s Next

Future improvements include adding a Smart Digest for weekly updates, implementing prerequisite tracking and course difficulty prediction, and introducing an intelligent scheduling feature that manages assignments and reminders for better academic balance. We also see a need of implementing a suggestion feature on events where the platform learns which events the students have been attending and provides recommendations on what the student might be interested in.