Revamp a website used for searching the Stanford Course Catalog for GSE specific course tags and details.
Obstacle
For Course Discovery 1.0, the software and web platform technology were soon going to expire. The plugin utilized by GSE IT to access the Stanford Catalog was also soon going to be rendered obsolete– i.e. two critical dependencies: Drupal 7 and the ExploreCourses project needed an overhaul. In addition, various feature requests the development team realized in Course Discovery 2.0 were impossible to achieve with the previous technology stack.
Drupal 7
CourseDogs the successor course catalog software for Stanford
ExploreCourses, the legacy course catalog software for Stanford
The project revamp required that two critical pieces be replaced: the Drupal 7 web framework and the ExploreCourses Drupal Plugin.
The GSE IT in-house developer first tackled the backend logic of replacing the ExploreCourses plugin. This was accomplished by creating a translation service with python to provide data packets of relevant course information to the frontend website. Once ExploreCourses is replaced with its successor service on campus, IT will easily be able to once again replace it to provide the relevant data packets for the Course Discovery 2.0 site.
Next, the developer worked on tackling the frontend website search and data presentation layer. Using ReactJS for the frontend, both a back and frontend were deployed on a more modern web stack with AWS Lambda, AWS S3, and Vercel. This achieved much better reliability, more relevant course descriptions and search results, and monumental cost savings compared to the legacy stack, which used traditional AWS servers and database infrastructure.
Finally, IT received approval from the GSE Academic Affairs team by the fifth month of the project, feedback on the feature requests originally requested in version 1.0 of the product, and made several changes based on client feedback. The project launched soon after at the start of the 2023-2024 academic year.
Tools Used
Python
AWS Serverless
AWS S3
ReactJS
Vercel
AWS Serverless
Python
ReactJS
IT saw great success with the Course Discovery 2.0 revamp. It fulfilled the feature requests that were on hold for several years with the original version (e.g. multi select dropdown selection for course tags, streamlining and removal of redundant course search results, better selection of courses based on available time). In addition, Academic Services was pleased with the speed of website updates and the available website metrics from the improved Google Analytics tooling. Students liked the quicker search results, fresh website design, and the improved mobile access view made available to them.
