Wow, haven’t posted since December! Impressive!

So here’s an update: Work is busy as hell, Stappenplan is still running (join the Hyve here) and I’m slowly working on a side-project that basically came up out of nowhere. Plus, I’m slowly searching for a place of my own in the hopes of moving out of my parents’ house someday, we’ll just have to wait and see how that goes….

Two weeks ago, I stumbled upon an offer for the sale of a certain website. I wasn’t really looking for a new project, but when I saw that domain name some old frustrations came bubbling back, and in about five minutes I had quite a comprehensive plan in mind of what I’d do with such a website. I offered the seller a reduced price for just the domain name (the website living there at the time would have required far too much work to fit into my plans, better off starting from scratch), and the sale was completed within a day.

There’s a problem, though. ICANN does not permit the transfer of domain names until 60 days after it was registered, or last transferred (see points 3.8 and 3.9 in section A of their Transfer Policy). And since the domain name was registered in mid-February, it won’t be transferred until mid-April. Which is why I won’t tell you the domain name yet, I don’t want you guys to hijack it ;-)

I will tell you what the project is about. The basic premise is quite simple: it’s a system for students to keep track of their grades and exams. Added into that are ease-of-use, both for the students and for the teachers who have to input the grades, and since all those grades are in the system anyway, I might as well throw some statistics and analysis in there and create a ranking system of sorts.

When a school buys a subscription to use the application, they will have the ability to upload a logo of the school and they’ll have an easy method of entering their classes and students’ and teachers’ details. I’ll have to figure out an easy-to-use way of doing this, I’m thinking CSV files at the moment, but I haven’t really decided yet.

I’ll also have to be careful what information about students and teachers to save in the system, because of privacy concerns. I’m thinking name, e-mail address, password and student ID should suffice. For teachers, name, e-mail and password should do.

Teachers will have the ability to assign students to classes and subjects, (maybe school admins should have this ability as well), and creating “gradables” (exams, practical tests, reports, whatever), and assigning grades to these items.

What I’m thinking students should be able to do, is view the average grades of all classes, detailed grades per class with a list of all grades, and like I said, use a ranking system of sorts. With this I mean they should be able to view their rank per subject, class, school, local area, or even nation-wide if this application will become that wide-spread.

More ideas are spinning for this, but I won’t make those public yet. I hope to have a restricted beta version running at the start of the next school year in September.

Will there be a market for this? I think so. One of the things that annoyed me most (especially in college) was the hackneyed systems we, as students, were forced to use to find out how we did in tests. Hopefully features such as the ranking system and other things I have in mind will give this an edge.

By the way, the design work for this project is being done by Igor Schell of I-Star Webdesign, and so far I have absolutely no complaints, the exception being his choice of software, but that’s nothing I should have any say over ;-)

Until next time, which may be soon, or it may be a year from now, who knows…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 1:12 am and is filed under General, Webdevelopment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.