Nexus Learning

Learn from the best with the best

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Inspiration

The barrier to quality education is high. The price of quality education is rising despite its increased demand. Though the Massive Open Online Course movement has helped to increase education accessibility, it nonetheless has its own drawbacks as shown with 2U's recent acquisition of edX and rising barriers for entry with other main platforms.

To combat this, we create Nexus Learning, the next step of the open education movement.

What it does

Nexus Learning is an online learning space by and for its community. Its members have the ability to access, review, and contribute to our course catalog free of charge. With a starting catalog of over 4000 online courses from the world's top universities, our students will have nowhere to go but up.

How we built it

To build nexus we used Google Firebase to handle our backend and database with HTML/CSS/JS for our frontend. To create our starting catalog, we web-scraped open courses from universities such as MIT, Cornell, and Stanford using pythons Scrapy framework and Pandas to filter and clean the data.

Challenges we ran into

We initially spend too much time scraping our starting database which led us to have to hurry through creating our website, which unfortunately did not quite get finished. However, we were still proud to get our backend, frontend, and scrapers working independently

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of implementing a firebase web app, which is a technology none of us had used before to create a scalable and impactful product. We are also proud of web-scraping open courses from the likes of UIUC, Berkley, MIT, and more.

What we learned

We learned as a team to stick together no matter how grim the outlook seemed and create an app we could all be proud of. This was 2 of our members' first hackathon so we were all happy with creating a semi-working product

What's next for Nexus Learning

We plan on adding more functionality to Nexus by adding a professor, textbook, and study groups page. The professor page would allow our members to follow and view courses from their favorite professors, the textbook page would provide access to students with textbooks as a supplement, and the study groups page would allow the community to interact, learn, and connect with each other.

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