OSU Course Analytics (Osuca)

Analyze student review responses for courses in the Computer Science (CS) program of Oregon State University (OSU)

Description

This program allows analyzing the online survey of course reviews from the CS students in OSU. It helps students answer questions such as:

• Does course difficulty vary from term to term?
• Does course difficulty increase if I take other courses in the same quarter?
• Which course combinations are most difficult taken together?

It also exposes several services for client programs to query course analytics in JSON format. See Communication Contract for further details.

Getting Started

Dependencies

Osuca requires Python 3.7 and newer. It can run on any operating system with Python.

Installing

Create a virtual environment and activate it.

macOS/Linux

$ mkdir osuca
$ cd osuca
$ python3 -m venv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate

Windows

> mkdir myproject
> cd myproject
> py -3 -m venv venv
> venv\Scripts\activate

Install Osuca and dependencies from PyPI

(venv) pip install osuca

Executing program

Set environment variables

macOS/Linux

$ export FLASK_APP=osuca
$ export OSUCA_DATA_SOURCE='https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MFBGJbOXVjtThgj5b6K0rv9xdsC1M2GQ0pJVB-8YCeU/export?format=csv'

Windows

> $env:FLASK_APP = "osuca"
> $env:OSUCA_DATA_SOURCE = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MFBGJbOXVjtThgj5b6K0rv9xdsC1M2GQ0pJVB-8YCeU/export?format=csv"

Run Osuca

flask run

View output in your browser at http://localhost:5000

Communication Contract

Osuca returns JSON objects for the following valid HTTP GET requests:

• /courses
• /course-year-aggregates
• /course-quarter-aggregates

For example, $curl http://localhost:5000/courses will return a JSON list of course objects to the clients.

UML Sequence Diagram

As shown in the diagram, Osuca requests a CSV document that resides in Google documents containing the scraped student responses. Then it serves the contents of this document in JSON form to clients.

Service Details

The following shows example responses to the requests.

/courses

[
  {
    "subject": "CS",
    "id": "419",
    "name": "Capstone"
  },
  {
    "subject": "CS",
    "id": "325",
    "name": "Analysis of Algorithms"
  }, …
]

/course-year-aggregates

 [
  {
    "course": {
      "subject": "CS",
      "id": "261",
      "name": "Data Structures"
    },
    "year": "2018",
    "aggregate": {
      "count": 11,
      "sum": 31,
      "mean": 2.81
    }
  }, …
 ]

/course-quarter-aggregates

[
  {
    "course": {
      "subject": "CS",
      "id": "290",
      "name": "Web Development"
    },
    "quarter": {
      "term": "Spring",
      "year": "2022"
    },
    "aggregate": {
      "count": 6,
      "sum": 15,
      "mean": 2.5
    }
  }, …
]

Authors

Tolga Ozbakan | tolga@ozbakan.com

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgments

Inspiration, code snippets, etc.

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