Dive Brief:
- More students are building apps using data provided for course selections and other uses, and colleges and universities are increasingly addressing them — for better or worse.
- Some higher education institutions are reacting by trying to shut down the student efforts, while others are collaborating with the app creators or even paying them, according to the New York Times.
- The apps are forcing schools to consider questions about data ownership, as well as the unintended consequences of making data available to students.
Dive Insight:
One question is whether schools can be convinced to release their data in uniform formats that would allow programmers to create tools that work across many campuses, and to build on the progress of other programmers. The Times reports on several examples of student app building. A Rutgers University student created an app that could continually query the course registration system to spot an opening in a popular class as soon as it appeared; 8,000 students used it within a year. A similar effort at Baruch College in Manhattan almost took down the City University of New York’s computer system. Brown University shut down a student’s attempt to build a website guide to favorite elective courses, while the University of California-Berkeley adapted a student-created scheduling app for its own use.