[Editors] Posting course schedule to dept. site

[Andrew Whitacre]

Since it wasn't mentioned below, everyone should know about the MIT Course Picker: http://picker.mit.edu/. Students made it for a similar reason to Bill's: the online catalog stinks, so they parsed the catalog Db to 1) create a faceted interface built around student needs, such as allowing things to be sorted by Institute requirements and 2) add picked classes to a calendar, so they can actually see what their schedule would look like.

I don't think it would work for Bill's needs, or at least not without the same work Nick did. It does, however, easily export to Google Calendar.

Andrew Whitacre
Communications Director
cmsw.mit.edu<http://cmsw.mit.edu> | civic.mit.edu<http://civic.mit.edu>
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(617) 324-0490
awhit at mit.edu<mailto:awhit at mit.edu>

On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:14 PM, Nick Holden wrote:

Hi all,

I took a stab at solving Bill’s issue below. If anyone else is looking for an easy way to gather information from the MIT Course Catalog for your websites, I built this app that will generate an HTML table with information about classes for a given course and term<http://mitcourses.herokuapp.com/>.

Let me know if you encounter any issues or if you’d find it useful to have this data in another format (RSS?).

Best,
Nick

Nick Holden
Communications and Alumni Coordinator
Office of Engineering Outreach Programs
MIT School of Engineering
617-324-9624 | nholden at mit.edu<mailto:nholden at mit.edu> | http://oeop.mit.edu<http://oeop.mit.edu/>

On May 27, 2015, at 2:21 PM, William T. G. Litant <wlitant at mit.edu<mailto:wlitant at mit.edu>> wrote:

Dear all:

Fighting my biannual battle posting our course schedule and have a question for you folks.

Currently, I receive the schedule from our department undergrad coordinator in the form of a .docx table. Yes, far from ideal. I then save as html, clean up the html, and embed in our site in the Drupal code for the page. http://aeroastro.mit.edu/academics/subject-information/current-schedule It makes for an ugly posting, the Word>html conversion is wonky, and it takes me too much time, but I’m not going to retype the whole thing. Ideally, I’d love to have a Drupal module that scrapes the same data (course, units, level, title, etc but NOT course description) from the Course Catalogue and creates/updates itself. Do any of you have anything like this or at least a more effective way for me to post this and update with minimal time spent? Thanks for any thoughts.

Best,
Bill



William Litant
communications director
Aeronautics and Astronautics Department
33-240
Mass. Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
617-253-1564


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