Returning to Radgrad I found a lot of useful features and resources that I either wasn’t aware of or didn’t remember. For me the project is very well-designed and fairly easy to navigate but has a lot to improve upon on its second iteration. The site is already well structured and flexible enough that just expanding the content and making a few tweaks would make it an essential tool for ICS students.
Leveling up in RadGrad wasn’t too hard. There were a few experiences I had already taken part in but never requested to be verified. Once I did, I hit level 3. I love the Get to 100 dropdown, it made it easier to find interests and new opportunites. The ICE system works well but the details around it seemed somewhat vague. For one I’m unsure of whether there’s any pattern to how each level depends on the ICE score. It would be interesting if there were multiple ways to get to the next level. For example, either get 10-Innovation, 50-Competency and 10-Experience, or 100 in any category. Another bit of confusion for me was how each opportunity fit into these categories; some I assumed would fufill Experience while they only fufilled Innovation. Although that’s probably by necessity, I don’t think any opportunity is going to fit neatly into any category.
Entering in to Explorer its a little jarring seeing an almost totally empty page. This blank space could be used as a “feed” showing you the hottest courses and opportunities or the ones that closely match your interests. It could also be used as a sort of news-feed, with local and international articles relating to CS and CS events. Once you open up the dropdown though and choose a topic the Explorer works great. Seeing the curation of local internships is very helpful and small details like seeing how many students are participating adds to it. Being able to sort based on Innovation, Experience or Interests is very useful, although a search bar would be nice.
Going into the course section I had a few issues. The system is pretty smart about which courses you’ve already taken and for the most part works well. It would be nice though if there were an option for greater integration with STAR so that it would automatically update your planner with courses that you’re signed up for. You could also pull grades from STAR and base competency points on that; a B gets 8 points, A gets 10 points… There was also a few glitches here and there. For one I accidentally added an academic year that I won’t be here for and couldn’t figure out how to remove it. Also the recommendations and warnings left behind some that seemed out dated, giving tips to reach level 3 after I already had.
The Mentor Space was a feature I didn’t remember but really enjoyed this time around. There were mentors from some pretty interesting organizations and the ask a question tool seems like very powerful tool. If we can bring on more mentors and encourage students to ask more questions it will be super helpful. We could potentially combine it with the faculty users page too and list those in the faculty that agree as mentors.
One aspect I would love RadGrad to focus on is expanding student input. Right now the students are mostly using the system independently and the only thing they put back in is ratings and sharing their interests. If there was a system for students to suggest opportunities we could greatly expand our content. Also expanding the communication among students seems important as well. Right now, only 11 students have opted to share their account but the information they are sharing is pretty limited. If students could opt in to sharing the courses they have planned and opportunities they are participating in, it could encourage other students to take part.
To me the biggest drawing feature of RadGrad is the course rating system. Getting to check what courses my peers like best is an extremely useful tool during registration. It has the potential to be better than systems like ratemyprofessor too; specifically rating one class is more useful to me than rating the professor. You can expand on this too by adding the option to rate the class based on the professor teaching it and the term it is taught in. Another thing I would love to see is course listings for non-ICS courses; not necessarily all courses but Science and Math courses would be extremely helpful.