Course List

website at fabioespinosa.com
website at fabioespinosa.com
How the chat looks

One pre-created chat group for every course at EPFL and UNIGE! To ease student collaboration in this pandemic. Try it out: https://fabioespinosa.com

Inspiration

During this pandemic many students have had it really hard collaborating with each other (either to do exercises for a course, or to hang around with teammates. At CERN we have an open source collaboration software called Mattermost, we were wondering if we could put it to the test in education.

Every semester there is someone in the middle of the semester who creates a Whatsapp group and things flow better afterwards. But what if that person doesn't create the group? What if we had it from day 1!?

But why not Discord you may ask?

We love discord, but it feels like we have games and courses all into the same thing. We kind of want to have academic life separated from gaming life.

Also, Discord has a hard limit on 500 channels, EPFL has around 2K courses, if we wanted to create a channel for every course, that wouldn't be possible.

What it does

It's a chat system in which there is a channel (or group chat) for every single course.

There is also a chat for University Life in which students can arbitrarily create channels.

Channels for EPFL are restricted to epfl.ch emails! so you're sure you're hanging out with your classmates.

There is also a whole group for Erasmus students who unfortunately didn't had it too well during this pandemic.

How we built it

We scraped the courses from EPFL coursebook and UNIGE course catalogue. We polished the data, and then we set up a Kubernetes cluster in which we deployed Mattermost, then we set up a aurora database in RDS for Mattermost to use it as a data source.

Lastly we set up S3 for file storage (so students can upload files to the chat!) and SES for email verification.

Ah and we built a react frontend here: https://fabioespinosa.com so that students can find the courses easier!

Challenges we ran into

Scraping courses from EPFL was reallllly annoying, there are always some exception in the html, unlike UNIGE which provided a clean API which their frontend used to fill the catalogue

Deploying Mattermost into Kubernetes was a whole pain and a whole learning experience, it was the first time both of us tried using EKS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a way to make student's life easier by giving them a platform where they can easily share, chat, collaborate and learn. It's verified, safe and free! And it's fully automatic! Professors, TA and students can directly join and everything is already set up! It is THAT easy!

It's a win-win where we adapt to these new normality by leveraging the technology around us.

What we learned

We had to interact with Kubernetes, Mattermost, and web scrapping (sometimes nice and easy, as it was for UNIGE, and sometimes not so straightforward, as it was for EPFL).