KnowYourProfessor

Know Your Professor
A simple and intuitive dashboard to view a professor's information!

Inspiration

Registration can be a very stressful time for all college students, regardless of the institution. Whether you are a confused freshman or a rising senior, it is crucial to make informed decisions about what classes you are going to take. Scavenging through multiple tabs of Rate My Professor and UTD Grades trying to pick out the professor and class that best fits your needs. You’ve been there, we’ve been there, who hasn’t been there? We have come up with a solution to relieve some of this pressure off of our UTD community! What if there was a platform that conveniently presents information from both databases? Introducing Know Your Professor.

What it does

KnowYourProfessor allows for students to access information from both Rate My Professor and UTD Grades. The student will input the professor’s name in the search bar. Results of the professor’s average rating and difficulty will be displayed. Additionally, the professor’s image, name, department, number of ratings on Rate My Professor, email, and office location is provided for student reference. An embedded site of the professor’s UTD Grades will automatically pop up upon pressing the button. This will allow the student to browse through the grades of specific classes that the professor has taught in the past.

How we built it

We used Nebula Lab API to acquire data for professor image, department, email, and office locations and acquired data on the average rating, average difficulty, and the number of ratings from the RateMyProfessor API.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was that the Nebula Lab API was not working on the client slide. Integrating the professor's results from UTD Grades was another challenge since we were trying to make it possible for the user to not have to physically add inputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a dashboard with a simple user interface that contains all the details a student needs to know about their current & future professors.

What we learned

We learned how to use React & Material UI, specifically React's useEffect & useState to make API calls.

What's next for KnowMyProfessor

Our future goal is to enhance this webpage by including features such as showing a weekly schedule of the professor including the timings and locations of the classes he or she is teaching. This feature will reflect the current schedule of the professor as it changes by semester. This would allow students to know the availability of each professor. Furthermore, information about the teachers' office hours and the location of the office will be included. The ultimate goal is to maintain a webpage that is the one-click destination for all things about your professor. We hope this will be a convenient resource for students to utilize during registration!