Inspiration
Since last year, students and education institutions faced the challenge of COVID 19. While some decisions need to be made swiftly like locking down, other major policy changes about academics and mental health would surely be better if decision makers had input from all their students. Of course, many students did use social media to voice their opinions but we wanted our suggestions to our schools and universities to have real weight. We thought there should be a way for all students to participate in making decisions that affect them. We were inspired by the vTaiwan initiative, which used related crowdsourcing techniques to get input, suggestions and feedback on government laws. We believe a similar consultative process will result in better decisions by school administrators. Furthermore, we were also inspired by our personal experiences with the education system. We felt many times that we wanted give out suggestions but had no solid platform to say it on.
What it does
Our web app allows students and faculty at an institution to discuss issues. We divide the topics into broad categories such as mental health or pandemic safety. Within a category such as mental health, there are subtopics such as counseling services or workload concerns. Participants can post suggestions addressing these subtopics, for example a proposal to ensure the quality of counseling services. Participants can also choose to agree or disagree with statements. Suggestions with widespread support are taken into consideration by staff and can be used to inform policies.
How we built it
We built the frontend using HTML5 and CSS3, it was also designed using the design tool Figma. Finally, we built the backend using Django web framework, which also uses python.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge that we run was merge conflicts while using Git
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud at how quickly and well designed the frontend was. Furthermore, this will also be first web application we've launched live
What we learned
We've learned that communication is key. When we communicated we were able to resolve our issues regarding Git. Since everybody knew who was commiting or coding or about to push code nobody's code merging conflicted with each other.
What's next for EduForums
The next logical step for EduForums would be having an actual student and education staff userbase. Also, it would be nice to have our website featured on an university's or school board's official website. We would also like to expand and improve features, such as fact sheets to aid students in their decisions and a page to quickly view the most popular suggestions.
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