TOKYO —

Awesome Course Schedule, an app released last year by Japanese content provider Labit, has been rapidly gaining traction with students at Japanese universities, because it allows them to rate and review their courses.

Any student that has taken a course can give it a rating out of five stars for overall satisfaction, difficulty and various other categories. They can also let future students know things like whether attendance is taken and how frequent exams are, important considerations in choosing the most, er, appropriate schedule for your motivation level. The app also prompts users to leave advice for other students thinking of taking the class.

According to the company, “By collecting feedback from students who have completed the course, we will enable the creation of even better classes.”

Of course, while the rating function has been grabbing attention, the app also allows users to draw up and manage course schedules online and to connect with other students taking the same class, convenient features that have contributed to its popularity. At the time of writing, an impressive 226,296 courses had been registered and, at Keio University, one out of every five students uses the app.

Some students will certainly use the app to find suitable courses and get the most out of their time at university, but it’s probably equally likely that some students will use it to craft super slacker schedules or to take revenge on that professor that failed them. So, what do you think, readers? Is this app going to empower students or just reduce education to a review-driven commodity?

Via IT Media

RocketNews24

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  CrAiGnEggS at Jul. 16, 2012 - 08:50AM JST

  Ha! "...whether attendance is taken..." <- I bet this class gets 5 starts! Ha!

  This reminds me of TripAdvisor in a way, so this might be viewed as a "review-driven commodity" BUT for those that are serious in choosing what they study, it can be a valuable tool. Hopefully, stronger students are able to decipher which comments are valuable criticisms and which are out of spite. It would be nice if students were able to learn how serious the student, who is leaving a comment, is in their studies, like to see the GPA of the student? Meaning a comment left by a student with a high GPA would be taken more seriously than a student with a low GPA. That would be tricky to pull off though, hmm...

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  jonobugs at Jul. 16, 2012 - 01:57PM JST

  My old university had that too, but they used the old fashioned paper system. Any student could rate their class and leave any comments for future students which was left in a big binder at student services. Also, every course was anonymously evaluated by all the students at the end of the term. Well, it was just a questionnaire, but it did make the professors at least try and teach well.

  Still, it would have been nice to have an app like that when I was in school!

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  A+b/a=a/b≡? at Jul. 16, 2012 - 03:13PM JST

  In a country where a GPA and Test scores do not matter much -at least not as much as attendance, this seems more like a fast-track-seeking app for Japanese students hoping to find more time to do part-time work while avoiding tough teachers with attendance keeping records. The ratings that students complete at the end of each semester are mostly based on popularity as opposed to academic rigor or some learning-linked reasoning.

  Nothing new in this technology, nothing that RateMyTeahcers.com nor RateMyProfessors.com (circa 1999) haven't already done... except just putting on a smaller screen.