Inspiration
MOOCs have an 8% completion rate. Millions of people are not completing most of their courses, although they intended to when they started them. An opportunity to boost the retention rates of MOOC courses by using psychological factors or game mechanics could have a tremendous scale, no matter how small the improvement may be. Coursera has 50% of the MOOC market.
What it does
It makes your new tab window on chrome a dashboard for your current Coursera courses. It also tracks your progress and reminds you when you haven't studied a course for more than 3 days.
How I built it
Chrome extension + CORS + Reverse Engineered the internal coursera API (as the public one is completely rubbish) + React.js
Challenges I ran into
Cross Origin Requests, Figuring out which endpoints to send http requests to, Understanding their API data model, Getting the User's ID (which was surprisingly hard), Different versions of Coursera pages and their transitioning data model from v1 to v2.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Tapping into Coursera's internal API for all my requests
What I learned
Raw XMLHttpRequests are a pain in the proverbial buttocks & Coursera API is a bit of a mess.
What's next for Loft
More reward mechanisms, better integration, some psychology research thrown in
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