Helping DUSes help their students
planned
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Andrew Miranker
To Neil Song and Humphrey Xu,
As both an instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) for Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B), I make considerable use of Coursetable. Most recently, it enabled me to identify course timing conflicts with other departments and suggest alternative meeting times to benefit our majors.
I’m writing to ask whether the worksheet calendar-sharing feature might be expanded to support additional use cases—specifically, the creation and sharing of suggested course schedules. For example, it would be useful to flag all courses in a given semester that fulfill one or another of our elective requirements.
One idea that comes to mind is to allow multiple “user” accounts, representing sample schedules, that students in the major could add as “friends.” Alternatively, there could be a way to share named worksheets, so that a student could choose to follow only the ones relevant to their interests or concentration within the major.
I imagine there are other technical paths to achieve something similar.
Thanks again for all the work you and your predecessors have put in to making Coursetable great.
Sincerely,
Andrew
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Neil Song
planned
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Neil Song
under review
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Neil Song
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for your kind words, and it is a pleasure to hear that CourseTable is helping not only students but also instructors and directors!
There currently exists functionality to share a worksheet as a URL (under the Export Icon dropdown, Copy worksheet as URL). As example, here is my Spring 2025 worksheet: https://coursetable.com/worksheet?ws=N4IgzgpghmD2B2IBcIBMAGVBWdBGEANCPFALYTIgCyUAlvAAQDqsATgNZgAWEEALoRABjWAFdWkMMgDaoIa0RIMuAOwqiXWgBMtERQDMoAG0hERRtpQDEQqFn1YAzCAC+BOQuSpsajdt0GxqbCsBas1lCOAEaoACxRru7CnkroABxpWH46esiGJhBmoZYoNnYOzm4eiti4qACc2QF5QYUhYdZa+mkAbE6J1V6OjrHoTblI+cHmJSBWkTHxrgC6LkA
From this read-only worksheet view, there is a new feature currently being developed which adds importing the currently viewed worksheet's classes into one of your own worksheets.
We could certainly add a feature to follow/subscribe to a read-only worksheet (which is then separately listed under the follower's worksheets dropdown). Is this something you would like to see added?
Thank you for your feature request - looking forward to your response.
Neil
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Andrew Miranker
Dear Neil,
THANKS!
This is a definately a route forward, and especially useful if you can add the import feature you describe.
The shared calendar via URL does not have any idenifying info though. Here is one I just made for students to see what we have already pre-approved as an elective in the fall for fufilling our Science and Society requirement in the major. The URL doesn't have my name, nor the fact that It is from my worksheet called "Science and Society". "https://coursetable.com/worksheet?ws=N4IgzgpghmD2B2IBcIBMAGVBWdBmEANCPFALYTIgDKAxgJYTw0QAEU8AJi1bPRAC4BPQiBqwArgCdIYZAG1QNSYiQBGVblwAOIgAs6HDo2QAzKABtIRMediTKAYgBGUAOxatqkAF8Ci5cjq6AAsqnoGRipmlhDWsLb2KA4cJloAbFj43gC63kA"
Also, as you consider how you implement the importing function, consider that in subsequent years, say fall 2029, I would want to build the 2029 version of this worksheet by dragging over what I can from this 2025 version.
For reference, our majors are currently informed using a google spreadsheet:
"https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ljk0JqjJ5ZRqTpcf3-dxjlCuf3wDo4wBxMCL4uv9Um4/edit?gid=0#gid=0"
Which is not a bad way to go, but I'd rather put this information where the students already go.
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Neil Song
Andrew Miranker: Awesome - identifying information for read-only worksheets is certainly something we can add. I have created an issue and put it on our roadmap
As for importing specifically worksheet courses across seasons, this will be a bit tricky since each iteration of a course is unique to the season and also may not be offered in some seasons. As a result, for future planning, we are also currently working on a wishlist feature, which will allow saving courses in a manner that encompasses season specific offerings. We can certainly put sharing/importing/multiple wishlists on the roadmap, but this will take longer to release than changes to the read-only worksheet.