CourseMix

Meet the team

• 

  Olaoluwa Akanji

• 

  Alexander Gullen

• 

  John Ross

The Problem

Brock is on a growth spree, with a net increase of 3041 students and 2 new departments since 2022.

12% of those students won't end up staying from year 1 to year 2.

Brock employs a "Supplementary"¹ Model of Academic advising. Tasks such as:

• Scheduling courses, done by 98.5% of acadmeic advising staff².
• Participating in student orientation, done by 94.9% of academic advising staff².
• Career-interest advising, done by 81.0% of academic advising staff².

Are left to Brock Academic Advising staff, currently consisting of 3 employees from the Office of the Registrar³

This can result in serious repercusions.

While all of us have had something of a difficult time changing classes, but some student testimonials show the real difficulty

Course picking at Brock University was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had. I thought it would be simple, but it turned into hours of stress. The classes I needed were either full or clashed with other requirements, and nothing seemed to fit the way it should.

I tried turning to academic advising, but the wait was so long it felt endless. By the time I finally got through, I had already wasted so much energy just waiting for help.

- Brock student

Course registration at Brock felt like trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces. I had my whole timetable planned out weeks in advance, but when registration opened, everything fell apart. The classes I wanted filled up within minutes, and the system kept crashing right when I was about to confirm. I tried rearranging my schedule over and over, but every option seemed to clash with another requirement. By the end of the day, I wasn’t even sure if I’d be taking the right courses for my degree anymore. It was supposed to be an exciting step forward, but it just left me feeling defeated.

- Brock student

As a Brock student balancing rent, tuition, and groceries, so when course selection chaos hit, I picked up extra shifts to cover fees. Add/drop week turned into “pick work or class,” and I missed key lectures and labs just to keep my account in good standing. The stress snowballed late-night buses, catching up on recordings, and scrambling for notes instead of actually learning.

- Brock student

Academic advising is crucial to the success of students, especially first year students:

First year students, regardless of social-economic background or previous level of achievement, who frequently met with an academic advisor were from 15 to 30% more likely to persist to their sophomore year than students who never met with an advisor.²

What we need

Our demo is live and available at https://coursemix.ca however, resource and data limitations have prevented us from mooving very far with anything except the computer science course. With the university's resources and data, we'd like to scale this up so that every student can have the tools they need to succeed.