
Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down - zt
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16/yale-students-made-a-better-version-of-its-course-catalog-then-yale-shut-it-down/
======
tikhonj
Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1].
This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings.
(Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.)

It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and
sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For
example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps,
less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of
choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools
(although I haven't looked too closely).

Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official
Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes
other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions.

Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as
well.

Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the
others :).

[1]: [http://ninjacourses.com/](http://ninjacourses.com/)

[2]:
[https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/](https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/)

~~~
creatio
How would one start to begin making such an scheduling algorithm? I'm asking
for learning purposes. What should I be reading? Or their resources for basic
such things...

~~~
kriro
Constraint programming would be a good start, you can also google nurse
scheduling problem.

You might want to research Prolog (since the Prologs tend to have good CS
libraries), specifically Eclipse (not to be confused with the IDE):
[http://eclipseclp.org/](http://eclipseclp.org/)

------
obblekk
Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously
open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism.
In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and
corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that
this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner
approach to censoring it.

The basic reason why Yale doesn't want this information easily accessible is
because it would force them to acknowledge that many of the staff are
brilliant researchers and absolutely lousy teachers.

This notion that thinking freely about tough problems, and having the ability
to pass your knowledge down the generations go together isn't true in the
hyper-competitive academic environment today. If a professor doesn't publish,
he/she can lose tenure, but if a professor doesn't teach well, he/she can have
more time to publish.

I think the best universities to learn are those where the professors truly
want to teach. Where their research isn't an end in itself, but a way to
inspire questions for another generation. Yale seems to be asserting that it's
not in this category.

~~~
bertil
I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits
your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them
improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent
TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent
too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar
problem, with a solution that is actually cheaper.

Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some
tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — and
people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being
openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled
students who failed after submitting their papers a month late.

“Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would
love.

~~~
nmodu
Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone
who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any
voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly
opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe
that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such
as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!”, or whatever that means).

Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an
engaging, captivating manner.

And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the
latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a
professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a
month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a
genuine interest in his educational experience.

~~~
bertil
No sweeping generalisation: I simply wrote that academic executives react
badly (all of them) to senior teachers (some of them) having a break-down
after reading poorly written and spiteful reviews (no matter how few of them
there are, and there always are some in a campus the size of Yale).

> Some teachers ARE lousy.

Very much so — I am one, and I’ve always told that most of my teachers at my
school were criminally bad. (I _did_ take steps to have some of them sent to
jail.) I do not remember arguing the opposite.

------
orf
My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely
shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface
you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it
produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and
every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover
the day before term started and rather than use that system I hacked together
an easier to use alternative from my bed using python + flask in literally 60
minutes and released it[1].

The administration went crazy when hundreds of students started using it and
asked me to take it down. While its not as impressive as something made at
Yale it seems to be a common theme, I wonder if other universities suffer the
same issues. Could be a market opportunity.

[1] [http://timetables.tomforb.es/](http://timetables.tomforb.es/)

~~~
chrismonsanto
ASP.net? What sorcery! My undergrad website was developed in classic ASP. Our
version control was copying files to a networked shared folder.

For an example of how utterly fucked classic ASP is: it has no API for
accessing file uploads. If you code it yourself, it disables all of the rest
of the parsing (query string, form variables, ...), which you then also have
to code yourself. Not to mention the whole "hasn't been supported by Microsoft
for a decade" thing.

~~~
pyre
Who would want to upload files via the HTML standard? Shouldn't you be using
some sort of SOAP API with an ActiveX control? Or maybe the users should login
to their local ActiveDirectory server and transfer the file to a shared folder
via SMB/CIFS. /s

~~~
toomuchtodo
The hair on my neck was raising up until I got to the /s

Well played.

~~~
TeMPOraL
If he wrote a few lines more before getting to /s, could the sudden
electrostatic discharge fry your computer? ;).

~~~
toomuchtodo
Goodbye Macbook Air as I throw it across the room :)

~~~
chris_wot
Thrown by the electrostatic discharge, I presume.

------
mgkimsal
Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and
disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have
essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ",
where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system.
It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some
are invalid (obviously, these are my own personal views, nothing more), but
the main takeaway is as with most problems, the core issue is _not_
technology, it's politics.

Students who have these "we could change the world!" ideas rarely understand
that they're not the first person to think of idea X, and that the issue is
who you know who can pull the right strings.

~~~
logicchains
At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it
shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of
the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance
something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.

~~~
jarito
Did you read the article? Yale not only attacked the authors of the site, they
used their web content filtering software to block it as malicious. Not much
can be done about that and still retain you users.

------
thetwiceler
Let's not blow this out of proportion. They scraped private data (that
required a Yale login) without permission and accidentally made it available
to a wider audience than intended.

Yale has historically been very supportive of these things. A couple of years
ago, they acquired another very slick course catalog website, Yale Bluebook,
for a good chunk of money [1].

[1] [http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-
acquires...](http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-acquires-
yale-bluebook/)

~~~
rst
Yale did eventually force the students to take the site down (or face
disciplinary action) --- but their first move was to block it from the campus
network, meaning that for a time, everyone _outside_ Yale could see it, but a
Yalie who wanted to would have to go off campus to Starbucks.

~~~
chwahoo
The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the
information.

------
x0054
How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution,
and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own
purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure
what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would
obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.

~~~
pistle
It would still require abuse of credentials and sharing of data which has not
been cleared (or may be legally unclearable) for public availability.

Just because someone has the ability to use their credentials to view
information does not remove legal liability for the use of that data upon the
institution providing the data.

The reason this got shut down was because there could easily be liability and
security concerns - about which a couple of hacking students could give two
shits.

If the students were, in fact, accepting other students' credentials to access
the system in any custom form (pulling data for the particular user vs.
harvesting no-account-specific data), and I were on the chopping block for IT
security at the uni, you better believe this would be shut down fast. Every
single user of that third-party system would be forced to set up a new
password and reminded of their obligations for proper handling of their own
security.

Now, get off my lawn!

------
acangiano
My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

~~~
DiggityDug7
I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of
patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive.

Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of
their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

~~~
trop
Some of the defensiveness may come from professional pride... Teaching (and
medicine?) is not as easy to rate as, say, a product on Amazon or an Ebay
seller. Speaking as a sometime adjunct instructor at a research university,
the "course evaluations" represent to me bringing corporate management theory
to a theoretically more high-minded institution. As others have commented
here, the pressure to publish lowers the priority of teaching for full-time
faculty. Bringing in low-paid part-timers to teach is not a healthy response
to this, and publicly rating/berating teachers is a band-aid on a situation
already lacking in trust and respect.

In a healthy college of Yale's quality, course choices should come from
competent individual advising of the students and student-to-student
discussion, rather than from ratings and a scheduling algorithm.

~~~
williamsharkey
Bad algorithms are bad and misused feedback is misused and competent advisers
are competent.

------
bonemachine
_Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation
information available to individuals not authorized to view the information._

Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually.

When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging
information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway --
it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask questions later. Taken
out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be
_fatal_ to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their
unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits.

So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student
creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If
anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.

~~~
absolution
_The site required Yale credentials to log in_

Requiring these credentials seems like a perfectly legitimate way to protect
this information. Later in the article it mentions other reasons that were
more likely to have contributed to the decision that they made.

~~~
bonemachine
The main point is that the evaluations are the University's property. It would
be irresponsible of them to entrust their protection to a third party --
especially when that third party seems to have set up their site without
obtaining the University's permission first.

------
kriro
Back in the day when I was a student, some other student built a php based
support forum with uploads for stuff you wrote during lectures and tests
ordered by professor and ratings, discussion about lectures and test prep etc.

It was the de facto meeting and exchange place for all things related to that
degree and was great value, I skipped quite a few classes that had good
material and opted for self study. Must have saved me lots of hours. The most
interesting thing was that there wasn't much pure leeching. Most people that
used it went out of their way to help new students, provide lessons learned
etc. Some professors actually had accounts (sometimes "undercover", was always
fun when they got "exposed")

The guy started it when he started his BA (equivalent) and wrote his MA thesis
about it and then the side faded away when he graduated (but by then there was
other stuff available anyways)

Wasn't sophisticated at all but man was it useful. Talk about identifying
customers and fixing their problems :) /old story

------
sheetjs
Were there any updates since the last discussion
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261)

([http://162.209.96.128/](http://162.209.96.128/))

------
thinkcomp
Seriously, reading this article it's almost as if they're deliberately re-
enacting Harvard's response to houseSYSTEM (which included course reviews,
scheduling features, and of course, The Facebook) from 11 years ago. It really
says something about institutional behavior. There must be some kind of
Independent Thinking Students Emergency Playbook they hand out in elite
university administrations.

As then-President Summmers said on September 15, 2005, “We are a community
that is committed to the authority of ideas, rather than to the idea of
authority.” What a perfect line to summarize their utter hypocrisy.

[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html)

------
DanBC
Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain)
website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could
use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their
terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a
few.

[http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25](http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25)

He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got taken down
pretty quickly.

It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people
protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

~~~
polymatter
The original site is at
([http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/](http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/)) where you
can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.

~~~
eterm
That's the same guy behind the Accessible UK train timetable (
[http://traintimes.org.uk/](http://traintimes.org.uk/) ), which is an absolute
life saver when trying to find quick train information on a mobile.

~~~
polymatter
Thanks for sharing! That site is brilliant.

------
bertil
One of the author posted on Reddit that they had been contacted by the
administration and their project was being re-considered.

------
sammcd
Did the same thing at my college. We crawled their course catalog. They
blocked our IP.

Our big addition was being able to sort classes by time and day, the
university ended up adding that feature, so I guess we got what we wanted?

------
dasil003
With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint.

In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student
unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there
was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having
recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a
new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved,
I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student
activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system.

They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and
push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the
University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template.

I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above
me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.

~~~
pdubs
UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their
schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal
schedules.

------
don_draper
Will someone please disrupt Academia? Tenured professors don't want you to see
that many suck at teaching so any website that brings that to light is
shutdown.

~~~
Ygg2
Problem is that Academia thinks that professors must be good at teaching and
research. It's akin to wanting your Librarians to be good at Calculus and
Library maintenance.

Research and teaching are separate skills, one doesn't imply the other.
Research requires great amount of intelligence and imagination and dedication,
while teaching is best suited for those that have great speaking abilities,
great charism and slightly lower intelligence (it's easier for people of same
IQ to relate). Asking to researcher to teach will detract from researching and
vice versa.

One solution is to have cooldown period of research to focus on teaching. But
I think R&D should be kept separate from teaching, but in the same way
teaching shouldn't be bogged down by standardization.

------
smsm42
So Yale students learned an important lesson - some of the staff cares much
more about looking good than about helping students, and the administration of
Yale would not be on the student's side in this case, because students come
and go and the teachers stay.

~~~
rbanffy
Which is a rather odd position because it's the students who pay the bills. Of
course, Yale, so it seems, feels safe for being Yale.

Let's see where online courses such as the Udacity one that starts today lead.
Yale may want to reconsider their position or build their own system so they
can have the metrics in place to guide their long-term strategies.

------
izietto
[XKCD] University Website [http://xkcd.com/773/](http://xkcd.com/773/)

------
Fuxy
Typical American double standard. We promote free speech but don't you dare
use it in a way we don't approve.

Is that really free speech then? I'm not free to say/do anything you don't
approve of.

And since when is it ok to threaten disciplinary action on a student that
didn't do anything wrong just provided a service students desperately need.

It's like me threatening to shoot your family if you don't sell me your house.

The second one is clearly illegal this one for some reason is ok can someone
enlighten me?

We're talking about these people's future in both situations?

~~~
esbranson
Well, technically...

Yale has made it clear they would set in motion procedures in which they may
decide to no longer to business with these brothers, over this website.

If I don't like someone or something someone said, I don't have to do business
with them. Yale is no different. Yale is a private organization that may do
business with whomever they wish for whatever reason they wish, outside of the
public policy decisions of the government. They have decided to utilize this
right.

Its not that Yale is violating anyone's rights, its that Yale is a making a
decision that reflects poorly on their institution.

Its the public institution equivalent of [insert bad thing here] to your
neighbor because of something they said. Its not a freedom of speech violation
to react that way, its just going to lose you alot of respect and alot of
business.

------
CalRobert
The more I reflect on my time at university, the more I realize it was an
utter and complete scam. Fortunately I was lucky enough to attend junior
college for a year and a half after graduating, took classes that I actually
wanted to take instead of whatever BS was prescribed by my program, and didn't
deal with manipulative twits for professors who held me hostage, forcing me to
do their research for them before they'd let me graduate. The sooner academia
dies, the better. I certainly won't shed any tears.

------
swombat
Ah, embracing innovation the British way.

I recall that 6 months before one of those "date the person right next to me"
sites picked up in the US, something similar was launched by some students in
a UK university (a pretty high-profile one, though I can't remember which
one... LSE? Imperial?). Anyway, long story short, the university IT department
shut it down on the grounds that it was not appropriate use of IT facilities.

Six months later, the same launched in the US and grew insanely fast.

~~~
gjm11
So this is "the British way" even though it's being done at Yale, because you
have one anecdote about something semi-similar happening at a university in
the UK?

(Only semi-similar, because I think you can make a better case for shutting
down a dating site using university IT facilities than for shutting down a
course-info site not using university IT facilities.)

~~~
swombat
I'm just taking a pot shot at Britain for this. Clearly, as this example
shows, it's not just a British habit.

------
xacaxulu
These brothers will be successful in spite of Yale. A story like this
definitely lends some cred when it comes to hiring time.

------
rcfox
I had a similar experience at my university (University of Waterloo), which I
discussed some time ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163)

In my case, it was internship postings instead of a course calendar, and I was
actually "punished" for it.

------
nicholaides
I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They
reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but
eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university
with a reputation for engineering can be.

------
lesterbuck
Maybe I missed something, but wouldn't this work fine as a browser extension?
I guess it depends on whether any individual student needed to crawl the whole
dataset, or only the subset of courses they are interested in. The Yale
administration is very clear that students have access to all the relevant
data, so let each student run their own app. The app could build the schedule
workbooks in local storage, no external entity required. Professors get the
privacy they want, and the students get the convenient view of the data they
want.

------
Cyph0n
I actually built a similar, albeit simpler, course scheduling website for
students of my university, UAEU. I however couldn't improve it because I
feared that it might catch the eye of one of the higher-ups and lead to my
expulsion. So I've left it as is. Quite a few students are using it, which is
more than enough for me.

Here's the site (no domain yet):

[http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/](http://nameless-
shore-4042.herokuapp.com/)

------
edelans
We used a quite similar tool (although much more MVP) in my business school in
France (ESSEC): we would share a google spreadsheet where we would comment and
rate our professors and classes. Although the administration knew about it,
they wouldn't accept it officially, which is quite disapointing in my opinion.
There are more than 10 years of data in there: the link is transmitted to
every promotion.

------
mathattack
Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with
one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured
faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also
are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure
if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)

------
kmfrk
This bring back memories. I did the same thing at my university way back when
- especially back when people still didn't bother to develop for iPhones.

I imagine they were afraid that people would get the wrong information, which
is fair in a way, but if Yale's website was anything like my university's,
then the website would far outweigh the alternative.

------
sirkneeland
I'm sorry, was someone under the impression that Yale or any other
institutions of higher education are progressive, cutting-edge institutions
employing best practices in IT or cost management?

These are reactive, hidebound institutions that have been able to go for at
least a century without transformative reforms.

They're rather overdue for it.

------
mikekij
Rename it "Stanford Bluebook+", give Stanford a 4 year license, and transfer.

------
jimbokun
My simple question, what has the Yale administration gained by doing this?

Now the Washington Post has picked up the story, making them look petty and
childish. Does whatever point they are trying to prove offset the PR damage?

------
rvac
Once you understand that these universities are more or less (publicly or
privately owned) corporations, their behavior starts making more sense. As far
as I know, many of them actually turn a profit.

------
0ptical
Oberlin did this, too - but the department supported it and I got credit for
working on it. [https://oprestissimo.com/](https://oprestissimo.com/)

------
darkhorn
Similar web application but it was not punished
[http://www.metutakvim.com/](http://www.metutakvim.com/)

------
jamdavswim
Say anything you want, as long as it's positive.

------
zoowar
Just give us the data and let us decide which application presents it in a
form we can consume efficiently.

------
dzink
Why not just limit access to validated students?

~~~
arkinus
Access was in fact limited to validated students. I think the administration
was concerned about graduate students and others who weren't authorized having
access to the data.

~~~
michaelt
What's the problem with graduate students having access?

At the place I went to graduate school we could view the same info as
undergraduates in terms of course timetables and instructor evaluations, and
it didn't seem to cause any problems.

~~~
theorique
_What 's the problem with graduate students having access?_

Anything in the institution that the bureaucracy does not control completely,
represents a "problem" to the bureaucracy.

------
iaygo
Is lecture attendance compulsory at Yale?

~~~
hangonhn
IIRC, no.

