MySyllabi Takes on a Life Beyond Senior Design Project
Second-year computer engineering graduate student Aristos Xanthus always felt that something was missing in the course registration resources available to students since his undergraduate freshman year at Santa Clara. When it came time to select his classes each quarter, he was constantly debating what classes were the right pick for him.
“The course catalog lacked a lot of course-specific information that would help me make a better decision of which class will make me the most successful,” Xanthus said. “Which one will I learn the most in? Which one will I be the most interested in? As a student, this is your education that you’re paying for and you want to get a good value out of that and learn something.”
With this problem statement in mind, Xanthus began establishing the resource he wanted to build: a compilation of any documents that contained pertinent class information.
The solution that Xanthus found was in the course syllabi. From workload to exams, course objectives to class format, he realized that having access to syllabi prior to registration could help students make an educated decision about which classes to take.
At the time, many professors did not make their syllabi public for students. So, Xanthus began his undergraduate senior design project, MySyllabi, to create a database of syllabi across university departments for students and faculty to access.
MySyllabi, according to Xanthus, enables anyone with a Santa Clara email to log in and access course syllabi and other relevant files that departments upload.. Under the guidance of Computer Science and Engineering Professor Angela Musurlian, it took Xanthus 8 months to finish from project planning to a complete pilot run. He demoed MySyllabi at the senior design conference in May 2022, and soon it blossomed into a passion project that would follow into his graduate career as a part of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab.
MySyllabi became accessible to students in June 2023. Despite its popularity, he faces difficulty in convincing departments and faculty to upload relevant files. According to Xanthus, 50% to 75% of students who log onto the website log off with no further actions– a sign that they can’t find the syllabi that they need.
He says this problem is particularly because the existing syllabi repository includes departments that are only in the School of Engineering, but he has been communicating with the Leavey School of Business School to expand the database. In the meantime, Xanthus is focusing on marketing the tool to Santa Clara students, especially as course registration is right around the corner on May 13.
“We believe that with more information, students will be able to do better in the course that they’re in, so now there’s potential to not do poorly in a class, or not fail it,” Xanthus said. “The whole process is mentally draining and stressful. If you choose a course based on the syllabus, what are the odds that you are blind sighted and drop the course? Based on a poll of 60 students, over 50% of people said that if they were to use this site, those chances would be a lot less.”