Abstract:

For some time now, courses offered at european universities are described by a particular document called "Course Outline", which follows a particular template containing sections on general information about each course, potential learning outcomes, syllabus, teaching and learning as well as evaluation methods and suggested bibliography. Apart from this rather qualitative information, a Course Outline also contains quantitative information regarding ECTS attributed to each course, semester workload in hours allocated to particular activities as well as weekly teaching schedule. While course outlines are expected to provide students with a comprehensive brief overview, several challenges arise in practice. Course outlines should be regularly updated in order to contain fresh and useful information. Moreover, all documents corresponding to course outlines should be timely and easily accessible in an easy-to-read format on the websites of departments as well as attached to Study Guides. Also, course outline templates should have a stable format enabling instructors to add data resulting in homogeneous and readable documents. The reality, however, is often quite different. Course outline documents do not have a homogeneous and attractive format, contain partial information, are rarely updated to reflect the current status of courses, and are not easily accessible being hidden or duplicated under various sections of departmental websites.

Having these observations in mind and also motivated by personal experiences either as students or instructors, we designed and developed COMa, an online platform for the management of course outlines for all registered universities. Our platform is available to both guests and registered users and is supervised and coordinated by designated administrators. Guests, i.e., users who do not have an account, can browse all course outlines available on the platform, filter them according to multiple criteria and print or download selected subsets. Registered users, i.e., users with an account, can be either general users or instructors, and apart from all functionalities available to guests further maintain list of favourites and list of created courses, and also access to profile management functionalities. In addition, instructors, who are clearly associated with their rank and affiliation, are granted full editing privileges for courses they have created. Administrators have full access (create, edit, delete) to all COMa entities, i.e., registered users, created courses, universities and departments, as well as editable fields on course outline forms. However, administrators cannot alter the status of other administrators of the platform; this is a privilege granted to a single super-administrator for safety and security purposes.

COMa is a responsive application, supports accessibility features and is currently available in greek and english, while english versions of course outline templates are automatically generated. To the best of our knowledge, no similar platform currently exists at a national or european level, despite the fact that it could be significantly helpful for students, instructors and administrative personnel, especially taking also into account the Erasmus programme. COMa has been developed with Next.js coupled with React, Typescript and PostgreSQL for the management of the database of the application, and it is currently hosted on the Vercel frontend cloud platform with a Neon database.

Keywords:

Course outlines, online management platform, university courses, bilingual content, automatic prinout extraction in official format, Erasmus programme, Next.js, React, Typescript, PostgreSQL Vercel, Neon.