Learning Hub

Inspiration

In an academic landscape that's increasingly competitive and fast-paced, navigating through Canvas and other Learning Management Systems is often difficult for both new and experienced students and could make a difference in a student's learning. With a handful of exams coming up, students are forced to waste valuable time searching the internet for extra practice problems or finding old exams. A non-universal structure of a course limits the potential for students to reach insightful conclusions and maximize learning.

What it does

Learning Hub revolutionizes study workflow by offering an exclusive, school-specific platform where students can connect with peers for collaborative learning. Sign in with a school email to:

Share and discover course-specific tips tailored to individual professors.
Exchange old exams to aid study sessions and preparation.
Bookmark and navigate students' current classes with ease using intuitive tags and searches.

Beyond just a study database, Learning Hub is the centralized resource students need, negating the endless search for course advice and old exams online. With a commitment to academic integrity, Learning Hub ensures that every piece of content aligns with academic honesty and excellence. Our difference is in the community-driven, real-time academic support directly linked to students' classes and professors.

How we built it

React.js & Next.js for a dynamic user interface
Styled with Tailwind CSS
Study resource data is managed through MongoDB with Prisma
tRPC for client-server interaction
Hosted on Vercel

Challenges we ran into

Working with Next.js v14 was an absolute nightmare. Many server side libraries were completely incompatible (primarily because of the "edge" runtime), forcing us to find alternatives or scrap features altogether. Working with Prisma made it worse. For some bizarre reason createMany would not work (but individually using create would), schemas would not push properly to Vercel, and I constantly had to keep making fresh copies of node_modules to get requests working. Admittedly, we put together technologies that haven't yet caught up yet. For example, tRPC has yet to have an official Next.js v13 integration and the recommended versions of react query conflict with the existing dependencies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making an app that shines with production grade technologies. We believe the code quality is fairly strong and includes references when necessary.

What we learned

We learned how to sidestep "edge" runtime concerns by picking intelligent alternatives (such as Accelerate for Prisma and jose for verifying/decoding tokens, as well as how to integrate tRPC with the new app router in Next.js v13. We also learned how to design basic relational databases in Prisma and interact with the Prisma client.

What's next for Learning Hub

We aim to expand Learning Hub's capabilities by developing a mobile application, ensuring that students have seamless access to study materials anytime, anywhere. We are also committed to safeguarding our users' academic integrity by planning to explore advanced plagiarism detection software integrations. We also plan to further enhance the course-specific recommendation algorithms to improve the personalization of study resources, which embodies our core mission of tailored, student-centric learning support.