About CourseCrafter

CourseCrafter offers Cornell students a new way to find courses of interest across campuses. We built this tool to help students discover courses and to research ways to facilitate course exploration. CourseCrafter uses information from the official course roster and a text matching algorithm to find the courses that best match your interests based on the official course title and description, and the search query you wrote. We cannot guarantee the correctness of the information provided beyond what is currently available on the Roster.

The information we gather from your engagement with CourseCrafter enables our research team to understand what is important to students in a course, how they express it, and how they explore various course choices at Cornell. The knowledge we gain through CourseCrafter is available to inform students' decisions, teaching and administration at Cornell, and the accumulation of scientific knowledge about academic choice and decision-making generally.

CourseCrafter Is A Research Project

Your contributions: By using CourseCrafter, you are volunteering for research. We record information about your interactions with CourseCrafter, specifically the search terms and timing of your activities on CourseCrafter and the hyperlinks you click. A cookie is used to track your usage. We also may ask you to answer some simple survey questions. In the interest of research, you may be exposed to some variation in the presentation of information available to you on CourseCrafter. You may stop participating in this research at any time by no longer using CourseCrafter. Neither your academic progress nor program eligibility is contingent on your participation or non-participation in CourseCrafter. We study the data we gather through CourseCrafter by analyzing trends and patterns in search and exploration. Because the data we collect is de-identified, we cannot and will not identify you by name in any discussions or publications, nor describe data in such a way that you could be identified. While we cannot guarantee that you will receive any benefits from using CourseCrafter, the potential benefits include helping you find out about courses of interest. There is minimal risk associated with participating in this research.

Our commitments: We use our research findings to continually improve CourseCrafter and contribute to public discussion of educational improvement at Cornell and worldwide. In doing our work we consider and analyze data and report research findings at the aggregate level only.

If you have questions about this research please contact Professor Rene Kizilcec at kizilcec@cornell.edu. If you have concerns about this research and would like to speak with someone independent of the research team, you may contact the Cornell IRB at irbhp@cornell.edu. If you have questions about this or any other aspect of this system, please contact Rene Kizilcec (kizilcec@cornell.edu).

Team Members

• Rene Kizilcec

  Assistant Professor, Computing and Information Science
  Director, Future of Learning Lab
  Instructor of INFO 4100 Learning Analytics
  

• Faizaan Datoo Computer Science BS '23

• Souleiman Benhida Computer Science BS '20

• Tiffany Zhong Information Science BA '22

• Saaqeb Siddiqi Information Science BS '20