CourseBuddy

** Please note that there are two videos (due to recording the slides and demo separately), the recommended sequence for viewing is:

Idea pitch: https://youtu.be/JITKV0_TgrQ
Chrome extension demo: https://youtu.be/XyAnUHK-9Hs

Sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Inspiration

Mission: To make a web app that transforms MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) learning and gives users a truly addictively fun learning experience shared with their best buddies.

Our creators often found themselves interested in the same online courses and hoping to support each others' learning. However, they quickly found themselves frustrated with the current process of learning an online course with friends:

To update our buddies on our progress we had to take screenshots, open a third-party messaging application and send screenshots.
As it was hard to keep tabs on each member's progress, it was also hard to find peers who were working on the same content when stuck.
It was hard to make new friends as course forum were clogged with messages from up to 7 years ago
With the numerous course providers, it was even challenging to keep up to date with our own progress across various courses.

The missing ingredient in MOOC learning today is the power of companionship and the thriving vibrant communities that come with it.

What it does

CourseBuddy helps you learn with the support of friends, and encouragement from the CourseBuddy gamified experience.

At the core it is empowered by the CourseBuddy Chrome extension that, with one click from whatever course provider's course page, allows you to update your course progress to your CourseBuddy friends and personal dashboard.

Discover new friends by joining or creating "course groups" Course groups are specific to a course (think for instance multiple groups for the same course by timezone etc, "CS50 Australia", "CS50 Argentina" or perhaps "CS50 career changers"). They ensure maximum interaction, engagement and fun with:

Automatic updates of progress (tasks complete) sent to the group
Leaderboard (with experience point calculations made off course duration and load data)
Progress chart (Stuck on module 4? You can tell that Lee and Sam are on the same module, time to grab a chat!)

Easily stay up to date with IRL friends' learning with "private groups"

All functionality from "course groups"
Shows ALL courses being attempted by ALL members (group size limit of 10)

**Gamified Experience" CourseBuddy leverages official course duration and workload figures to automatically generate experience points corresponding to each course module. Experience points can be used for:

Stickers
Awards for buddies (similar to Reddit awards)

Market Viability Revenue generation through course recommendations (affiliate programs) Significant market growth in online learning and sustained growth projected.

How we built it

Our development plan is focused on incremental building. Phase 1: Users' manual course entry creation (first user in particular course enters details) Phase 2: Web scraper to automatically create course entries **Phase 3: Building on Phase 2, additionally development of Chrome extension for one click updates to course progress"

Challenges we ran into

Due to unexpected circumstances, I (Qianrui) lost contact with my original partner for more than 24 hours and decided to within. With encouragement from the organisers I set out to find a new team and do what I could within the limited time left. My peers Zoe and Emily offered to help, we officially started on the evening of the 10th.

However, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn to prioritise and "hack" what could be done within the limited time available. We are tremendously grateful for the support that the organisers, particularly Prat, Rahul & Stavya, gave us.