Preparing for Course Enrolment
As Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. [1]” As university students, we know this all too well. Whatever it may be, the more we prepare ourselves, the better we end up performing.
However, one thing many students do not prepare adequately for is course enrolment. Though it may seem insignificant, this can really change everything about the university experience by shaping your schedule and even the course selection path you will take throughout your university career.
One reason as to why some students do not prepare for their course enrolment is likely because it can feel like a hassle. Working through program requirements, lecture timings, and professor ratings may feel unnecessarily complicated and cause some people to waste a lot of time and others not to plan for their courses properly. One solution is the website UW Flow, the one stop shop for course information.
The origins of UW Flow
The UW Flow website was first launched by a group of Software Engineering students at the University of Waterloo in 2012, since then it has gained much momentum as a tool that students use before each study term to decide what courses they want to select, or learn more about the ones they have already selected. This website is maintained constantly to ensure the information presented is accurate and up-to-date [2].
As stated by the founders of UW Flow:
“… We wanted to build a tool useful to students. We wanted to build something that would be used while we were still in school, but also years after we left [3]”.
It was in this spirit that the project of the continuous maintenance and updating of UW Flow was left in the hands of Jeff Gulbronson, a current member of the software engineering program at the University of Waterloo.
The Founders
The Maintainer
The maintainer of UW Flow is Jeff Gulbronson, who first started working with UW Flow when he decided to contribute to the code of the website by viewing the open-source code on Github.
Why is UW Flow so useful?
One reason why UW Flow is so useful is its smooth user interface. It is very easy to navigate, making it straightforward for busy students to use instead of finding different pieces of information in different locations. Once connected to uwflow.com, there is an icon toward the top of the screen that says “Explore courses.”
This will bring you to a page with a search bar and a list of courses, which is a complete list of courses at the university.
The system that UW Flow has put in place for students to find courses is one of the more unique aspects of the website.
It allows you to search for courses based on categories like popular, interesting, easy, and hard. This makes it easy to search for courses based on your own criteria and requirements.
Each course is rated by other students who have already taken it in the past so that students are provided with the most useful and accurate information.
This rating process is secure from having false ratings given by people who did not actually take the course since one can only rate a course after they have submitted their transcript to UW Flow. Courses are rated based on certain categories, making them very simple to read. These categories include whether or not the course is useful, easy and liked by students.
The site also allows students to write comments about the course. Each instructor who has taught the course is also given a rating based on whether or not they are clear and engaging. There is also a space for comments about instructors.
All of these course-rating criteria ensure clear, relevant and accurate information for students to benefit from reading.
https://uwflow.com/course/cs136
When researching a specific course, there is plenty of information available through the rating criteria above. However, UW Flow does not just provide students’ opinions about the course.
It also provides other useful information such as course descriptions, sections, timings, instructors and more. All of this information being made available on this site makes it very easy for students to plan for their courses because it gives the same amount of information that one would normally go to three or four different web sites to obtain.
For instance, a student who is unaware of UW Flow may go to the Quest website for course sections, timings, and availability. Then they may visit a course page on the university’s main website to find a course description. After this, they might go to a website that rates professors and how well students think they teach so that they can decide which professor’s class, they would like to enrol in.
Additionally, they may contact some of their friends who may have taken a particular course to get some information about the course from the perspective of a student.
UW Flow can save a student a lot of time and hassle when preparing for course enrolment since all of the information is available in one place.
As with any website that runs on feedback from a population, UW Flow relies on students to not only benefit from reading their peers' ratings on courses before every term, but to actively post their own raticngs after each term as well. This allows for a recurring cycle of information that can help many students for years to come.
Another way to help UW Flow improve and remain a relevant and useful system for students is to take a look at the open-source code on GitHub, just like UW Flow Maintainer, Jeff Gulbronson. The link is available from the UW Flow main page for anyone who is interested in helping UW Flow with updates, or with fixing any potential bugs with the system.
Using one’s coding talents in this way could help them learn a lot more about such projects, and it could help many students just like them utilize UW Flow to its maximum potential.
Conclusion
Utilizing UW Flow is a great way for students to prepare for an upcoming term and to share the positive and negative experiences of any given course they have taken in the past.
It is full of useful information and is a great platform for students to help each other achieve their best potential. Because it requires user feedback to improve, the more students provide that feedback, the more useful this resource will be for all students to benefit from.
Just like preparing for course enrolment or anything else, the more effort you give, the more benefits you get.
References
[1] “Quotes about Preparation (211 quotes)”. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2017, from <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/preparation>.
[2] UW Flow. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2017, from http://blog.uwflow.com.
[3] F. (n.d.). Flow. Retrieved October 20, 2017, from <https://uwflow.com>.
