Johan Svensson and Jesper Norrwie

Course evaluation system for students based on user generated content


Abstract

Choosing the elective courses for your university education is not always an easy task, as the information about what the courses is often abstract and quite hard to read. The most accurate information about a course is obtained from students who have actually taken the course. Course evaluations made by students are submitted regularly to the different institutions on the school, but these are hard to find and are mainly targeted towards the professors. There is also no forum where all these evaluations are gathered and made available for others to read. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to find out how university students feel about using an application for evaluating, adding and finding information about the elective courses on the school. In order to do this, we made a questionnaire and held two focus groups. We also developed a prototype of an application that was tested by university students. Further more, we also studied Web 2.0 and User Generated Content as a phenomenon on the web. Similar systems for submitting course evaluations were also studied in order to find out what has already been done. The results of this study shows that students have a positive attitude towards using an application of this kind for finding information about university courses, as a majority of them feel that there is not enough information available. However, much fewer felt like using the application to evaluate courses or adding new courses for others to evaluate.