MCIT Course Recommender

Inspiration

MCIT community is comprised of a cohort of students from multidisciplinary background who have diverse preferences for their future career plan. However, when it comes to course selection, they may be unsure what courses are relevant to their career objectives.

What it does

This project is a course recommendation website that suggests a list of CIT or CIS (500 or above) courses based on users' preference. Users can select from a list of job titles and programming languages that they would like to explore. The website will then show a list of elective courses that fit those preferences.

How we built it

Javascript, CSS and HTML were used to create the website. The job roles and programming languages relevant to each course are manually filled in based on our judgment. Course descriptions are taken directly from the UPenn CIT and CIS websites.

Challenges we ran into

Because of each course has many properties, i.e. name, description, relevant job roles, relevant skills; therefore, we initially wanted to use database to house all the course data. However, this was very challenging because we were new to database implementation and ran into problems while trying out and connecting to databases like MongoDB and SQL. In addition, we realized it was difficult to call constants from other HTML, so we ended up placing all the Javascript objects in the same HTML. To appropriately display our results in another HTML page, we used a local storage solution that allows results to be called between HTMLs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning new skills, i.e. Javascript, CSS, HTML, and others, within a short period of time and developing a product that is useful for end users.

What we learned

We learned that planning and communication are crucial to this type of team projects. This includes the discussion about how the end product should look like and functionalities it should have. The allocation of team work also helps alleviate some stress off individual team members.

What's next for MCIT Course Recommender

We wish to provide our project as a solution to help MCIT students find our courses that are the most relevant to their career objectives. Because the job roles and programming skills relevant to each course is manually inputted through our team's judgment, we may not capture the best relevance. Therefore, the website is likely going to be more useful and effective if individual course instructors can provide their opinions in terms of how their courses relate to particulars job roles or programming languages.