Supporting the Choice of University for Exchange Programs
World Campus is a mobile web application that can support the decision for a student considering which campus to apply for an exchange program. This application provides enormous information about outgoing university and countries with user-friendly layouts and designs. While assisting the arrangement of considerations, it helps students efficiently to make their own preference list of universities for an exchange program.
Index Terms Information Systems, Decision Supporting Systems, Web Application, Mobile, Reactjs
The idea for this application stems from the personal experience, making the application of exchange program. I had to choose 15 at maximum universities among more than 80 ones. Checking the suitability, such as English requirements and Course restrictions, for each university and every conditions consumed long time repeatedly. I though that handling the huge number of cells and sites could be effeciently processed through an information system. By reducing the redundant non-judgemental operations can be beneficial to make an clear and well-informed decision.
Determining whether I can apply this university or not is simple task but takes long time. Every comparision of my English test score, major and other static information with the other universities' qualifications are procedeed on hands and eyes. Furthermore, some of qualifications are more detail than others, which makes it difficult to comparing the numbers only.
When making an order of applicable universities in my preference, my relative criterias are changed time to time. It delays the entire decision and often affects other criterias. In addition, because of the ambiguity, the final order is eventually decided in qualitative and relative manner.
The fact information of all universities are located in their own website, which makes hard to collect in a single format and compare amone them. Opening web pages and searching the requiring information also consumes time and is done repeatedly.
- U.S. News Compare Colleges This webpage allows users to choose universities and compare them. Main targets are students who want to enter the universities in United States. There is the average alumni starting salary, acceptance rate and 4-year graduation rate, which is main concerns for applicants.
- ISEP ISEP(International Student Exchange Program) is multi-lateral and global exchange student programs. Over 300 universities have been participating in this program and their students can have an opportunity to visit other member universities. Its program finder supports pinned map which can be used to look for applicable universities. There are region, country, field of study and language conditions as primary search filters. In addition, academic level, features and academic qualifications are available to apply filters. Specific information for each university deals with the city where the university is, and basic information about the university.
- GE3 GE3(Global Engineering Education Exchange) program is an exchange program for undergraduate engineering students. There are over 20 countries and over 70 universities participating in this program. Its website provides an advanced search tool which can filter the location (city, region, country and term), disciplines, English courses and other conditions. There is also single sort options (program name, city, country and region). For each university, there are fast facts, short introduction, study level and English requirements. Most of academic information are provided through external links. The fact page includes housing and city information where the university is located.
- QS QS(Quacquarelli Symonds) provides world university rankings every years. There are various kinds of rankings, upon subject, graduate employability, best student cities, business masters and others. The overall ranking is determined through multiple criterias. There are region, location and subject conditions for filtering the universities. Detailed information for each university mainly refers to brief introduction and academic subjects.
The application should be able to keep the applicant's information. Regarding to the eligibility of the programs, one's major, English qualifications and other specific items should be noted first.
The application should be able to display all universities which exist in the recruit sheet. Besides with the university's name, some basic information such as region, country and others also should be shown. The user should be able to manipulate multiple seraching and sorting conditions.
After clicking one of universities in the list, the user should be able to see the detailed information about the university and its locations. The top of the layout contains the related university's image if it exists. University's homepage and its program's webpage also should be available. There is an requirements section that contains minimum level of applicable students. Another sections are about its courses, city and accomodation. The last section shows how many and who have been the university from my origin. In addition, the university's world ranking should be contained. Right below the city's information, its location is displayed on external API.
In the details, the user should be able to make judgements whether I can apply or not for each item. There should be a qualitative judgements like negative or positive with ratings (like 1 to 5). The automatic determinations should be provided if there is enough personal information with its corresponding university's information. For items that consists of short paragraphs, those should be able to make a rate and keep a comment.
In order to make a list of prefered universities, one's personal criterions should be kept. All qualitative and quantitative items should be registered and handled. Through the personal options above, the list of universities should be able to generated with their scores.
This application runs on ReactJS without any backend frameworks. Some static resources might be delivered through another CDN servers. The layouts mainly convern about mobile environment, not a desktop browser. Development and test are done with MacBook Air (2020) and iPhone SE (2020). The guaranteed web browser is only the latest version of Safari.
In the Profile tab, all fields will be set as default if there is nothing modified before. If any field is changed, the 'cancel' and 'save' buttons will appear on the layout. Followings are the items user can enter;
- College
- Department
- GPA (4.5, 4.3, 4.0 in maximum)
- English Qualifications (TOEFL IBT, IELTS, TOEFL ITP)
- Is taking a leave of absence
The user can define one's own criteria upon selecting the prefered universities. It can be added 5 at most. Its name can be modified and dropped.
The entire information is provided in JSON, which will be manipulated by the client. When there is a update patch that is informed through HTTP API, the cached file will be updated and related data is also manipulated properly.
For the begining, all universities are displayed and sorted with their unique identifiers. On the main layout, there are 4 options at maximums and other conditions will be shown after 'expand' button is pressed. When a condition is newly applied or changed, its icon will appear on the new line. It will disappear if a user click it. Followings are the items;
- Region
- Country (Name, Population, GDP, Territory)
- University Association (GE3, AACSB, EQUiS, n+i, ISEP)
- Size (Faculty, Student, Exchange Student)
- Applicable
- Favorites
For each university in the list, its title and some specifications noted in filters will be displayed. If the item area is clicked, user will see the details of that university.
- Title
- Region
- Country
- Applicable
- Favorites
On the top of the layout, the university's images will appear if they exist. Otherwise, the section will be replaced with an anonymous university icon. University's title will be labeled with bold and larger text format. Other texts are same with one in the list. There is editable note area, which can be modified by the user. The 'Heart' icon is for Favorite label and the university is registered when the icon is clicked.
Qualification section will have a green border if all requirements are fulfilled. If there is any unfitted condition, it will have a red one. In other case, the border's color is default. All qualification items have a current status; either 'Fit', 'Unfit' or 'Unrated'. The editable area will appear when the user click. After an user changes any status, the entire status will be updated if necessary. All specificaions have their fact basis which is provided with external links or files appended with comment.
Quantatitative statistics about the university will be displayed. Some of items have additional labels like 'small', 'middle' and 'large'. In addition, the average of all universities will be appended for some specifications. In regard of the city and country, its basic information and global rankings will appear. For each item, user can input one's subjective ratings, like 1 to 5. Besides of them, the user's custom criteria can be modified.
For each university's statistics, the indicator shows its global ranking, regional ranking and South Korea's one together.
The university's location will be displayed with the external map API. The images of university or city will be shown through the picture slides which can be changed.
On the bottom of the layout, related external links will be displayed. When the user clicks one of them, the new page will be loaded in another tab or window.
- Recruit Information
- University's official web site
- Google Search result of the university
- Wikipedia of the university, city and country
If the user clicks the 'Setting' icon, the configuration pannel will appear. There will be default settings. Most of search filters can be applied. There are checkboxes whether the result list contains the unqualified ones or not.
The user can adjust the priorities of sorting criteria and assign their weights. The total weights will be 10 at maximum. User can modify the list of criteria and their weights. These weights will be transformed into ratio among the overall criteria. For a classification, User can define the items' priority in details, which is allocated in integer.
Through the user-defined criteria, the ranking of universities is automatically calculated. The result page will show the total score and the ranked universities' scores. In addition, their specific scores will be displayed beisides of its overall one. The excluded universities won't appear.
React
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Django
Laravel
Facebook
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Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent