A few weeks ago, one of our team members, Sean, downloaded an app called Beli, a restaurant ranking platform that uses pairwise comparisons instead of static ratings. Despite never being a restaurant reviewer, he found himself ranking nearly 200 restaurants in just a few days.
Why? Because Beli makes the process interactive, social, and fun.
This sparked an idea—what if we applied this same concept to course reviews?
🚨 Problem:
Traditional course review platforms suffer from low engagement, leaving many courses without sufficient reviews. As a result, students are forced to guess when selecting their classes.
✨ Our Solution:
By making ranking as engaging and game-like as Beli, we can incentivize students to participate more, leading to richer, more complete data that benefits everyone.
Classi revolutionizes the way students rank and review courses and professors. Instead of assigning static ratings, users:
👉 Compare two options at a time, dynamically refining their personal rankings.
👉 Use a binary search-based system to reduce decision fatigue.
👉 Experience fast, intuitive, and fun ranking.
- 🏆 Social Integration – Compare rankings with friends.
- 📊 Comprehensive Course Profiles – See difficulty, workload, and student insights at a glance.
- 🔍 Advanced Search & Filters – Find courses that match your learning style.
We focused on speed, usability, and scalability, using:
- Next.js – Ensures a seamless, interactive experience.
- Express.js – Efficient API handling.
- MongoDB – Stores rankings, reviews, and user data.
Our goal was to keep interactions lightweight and engaging, enabling students to make meaningful comparisons with just a few taps.
One of the biggest hurdles was implementing an efficient binary insertion method that dynamically updates rankings. Since our team was new to backend development, we faced challenges such as:
🔹 Structuring and optimizing the database for fast ranking updates.
🔹 Handling asynchronous operations efficiently in Express.js.
🔹 Debugging complex API requests to ensure smooth performance.
By overcoming these challenges, we significantly improved our backend development skills! 💪
🔹 User engagement thrives on interaction. Making ranking feel like a game boosts participation.
🔹 Traditional rating systems are flawed. Static reviews don’t encourage enough data collection.
🔹 Social features increase retention. Users engage more when they can compare rankings with friends.
👉 Expanding Social Features – Leaderboards, ranked categories, and global course scores.
👉 AI-Powered Recommendations – Machine learning-based course suggestions.
👉 Mobile App Development – Bringing Classi to iOS & Android.
👉 Integration with Universities – Partnering with schools for official course insights.
By transforming course selection into an engaging, personalized, and data-driven experience, Classi has the potential to revolutionize how students discover, rank, and review their academic options. 🚀