User:Aman0018/sandbox

NUSMods

NUSMods, short for NUS Modifications, is a non-profit, open source application built by students for students. It provides students of the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a better way to plan their school timetables with a user-friendly timetable builder where students can plan their timetable via  drag and drop.

In addition, NUSMods functions as a complete knowledge bank of NUS modules. It provides NUS students useful module-related information such as archived CORS bidding statistics, community-driven module reviews and discussions which helps them in making their module selection. In January 2015 alone, NUSMods was visited 2,000,000 times and accessed it by 66,000 different devices.

NUSMods’ long term goal is to become a website providing useful tools to increase the quality of the lives of students studying in NUS.

History of NUSMods
NUSMods was founded in 2012 by Eu Beng Hee, who was then a student in NUS School of Computing. He realised that the timetable builder that NUS provided for students was not user friendly. When he graduated in 2014, Tay Yang Shun, who is also from NUS School of Computing, took over the responsibility of upgrading and maintaining the application. Before joining the NUSMods team, Tay, together with Toh Weiqing, founded Corspedia. The purpose of Corspedia was to publish past statistics regarding the bidding of modules in NUS in a way which is easily understood. These statistics were obtained from NUS’ website the bidding points for a single module could be compared across semesters. Thus, when Tay joined the NUSMods team, he immediately integrated Corspedia into NUSMods. Tay also contributed to NUSMods by revamping the user interface, designing a logo and making the NUSMods’ Facebook page in line with the website.

Core Team members

 * Tay Yang Shun-Current main developer
 * Ashray Jain
 * Ang Yen Ling- Marketer
 * Liu Xinan
 * Xu Bili

Other Developers who have contributed to NUSmods currently or previously

 * Eu Beng Hee
 * Hong Lu
 * Zhu Chunqi
 * Tan Guo Xiang
 * Wei Seng
 * Jishnu Mohan
 * Han Lin
 * Franklin Gu
 * Sam-Maurice Yong
 * Jingwen

Marketing
The developing team does not do a lot to spread NUSMods among students. However, since NUSMods is developed by students themselves, they understand the common problems NUS students face when planning their timetables. Thus, NUSMods is able to solve the timetabling problem that for NUS students, making them so popular among students.

Open Source
NUSMods is open-sourced and their source code is hosted on Github. Thus, anyone who is interested in helping out can view the source code and fix issues.

Other Initiatives integrated into NUSmods
These initiatives are by students with the aim to improve the lives of NUS students and have been integrated into NUSmods as of July 2014 :
 * IVLE Cloud Sync
 * IVLE Cloud Sync simplifies workbin management by pushing new files to your Dropbox and giving you automatic updates as they happen
 * Corspedia
 * A search engine for NUS CORS Bidding Archives

Use of Application Programme Interface
NUSMods makes use of API, and it is still in its early stage of development. NUSMods API consolidates and normalizes various bits of NUS module information from the following sources: Information about the various modules offered in NUS may change several times a day. Thus, using JSON API, together with support from CORS and JSONP, the NUSMods API is generated using statistical methods so that the API can be as fast as possible and also browsable online at http://api.nusmods.com. Web crawlers are broken down into modules, written separately as Grunt tasks using simple filesystem caching and HTTP if-modified-since headers. Thus, a specific subset of information can be easily retrieved. During the developing process, this helps to reduce waiting time.
 * CORS historical bidding statistics
 * CORS module information listings
 * IVLE API
 * NUS Bulletin
 * NUS Examination Time-Table
 * NUS Living Lab API

Module Review Contest
In December 2014, NUSMods organised a module review competition where the best reviews would win cash vouchers in order to encourage students to submit their reviews on taken modules. There were also prizes for several fun categories - Funniest, Most Creative and Most Rage. The review function uses Disqus plugin which embeds photograph and videos in the reviews. In less than a month, over 200 reviews were submitted.