Following the Sept. 30 closure of MyEdu, a popular online registration planning tool, students are searching for alternative methods to plan their schedules for the Spring 2017 semester.
Leo Angulo, a biology and public health sophomore, said the site’s closure has taken a valuable resource from students.
“I was a little distraught and frustrated [about the site closing],” Angulo said. “It’s something I really depended on to plan out my schedule.”
To fill the void left by MyEdu’s closure, students are using alternate websites such as ClassPoint and Coursicle to plan their schedules.
ClassPoint was created by UT alumnus Ari Schulman when he was a student in 2007. The registration tool served approximately 2000 users each year until MyEdu gained popularity, Schulman said.
“[Usage] dropped off pretty steeply after that,” Schulman said. “Since 2012, it was in the three digits of people still using it at UT, which was enough that I contemplated shutting it down.”
Schulman said he has noticed a recent resurgence in activity on the site, with over 1400 sign-ups in the past week alone.
“It’s now back up at or possibly above the levels of usage it had when it first launched,” Schulman said.
The site’s schedule planner, similar to MyEdu’s, includes all of the information available on the UT course schedule and additional resources such as discussion boards and professor reviews.
Taylor Schaefer, radio-television-film sophomore, said she used ClassPoint and found it to be similar to MyEdu.
“I think mostly I was looking for something that had the UT classes uploaded in it, so that was really helpful,” Schaefer said. “If you just have a spreadsheet template, you still have to go find all the classes and plug them in yourself.”
Coursicle became available to UT students on Monday. Joe Puccio and Tara Aida founded the site in 2012 when they were students registering for classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard University, respectively.
In addition to being linked to UT’s course schedule, Coursicle allows students to connect their account to social media and see what classes their friends are considering. It also lets students create several hypothetical schedules for the same semester.
Aida said the shutdown of MyEdu prompted the site’s recent expansion to UT.
“We were cognizant that MyEdu was shutting down, so we wanted to add a school where a lot of students were using that service,” Aida said. “We thought [UT] would be a good school to reach out to so students would have some sort of alternative instead of having to go from having this tool that everyone uses, MyEdu, to… having to go back to Excel or paper.”
