🛑 The Problem
During registration periods, getting into the right course sections with preferred timings or instructors can be incredibly difficult. Students often resort to constantly refreshing the registration portal hoping a seat opens up, or they turn to social media groups trying to arrange manual "swaps" with other students. This process is highly uncoordinated, relies heavily on luck, and requires tedious manual communication that often falls through at the last minute.
💡 The Idea
CourseMate acts as an intelligent intermediary. Instead of hunting through WhatsApp groups or hoping for a random drop, students can use CourseMate to declare exactly what course section they have, and what section they want. The platform handles the rest securely and intelligently.
🚀 How It Solves These Problems
CourseMate streamlines the entire process through several key mechanisms:
- Smart Swapping: If Student A has Section 1 but wants Section 2, and Student B has Section 2 but wants Section 1, CourseMate's smart matching algorithm instantly connects them.
- Giveaways & Requests: If a student is simply dropping a course and doesn't need a swap, they can list it as a Giveaway for anyone who needs it. Conversely, students can post Requests for sections they desperately need.
- Instant Notifications: Students no longer need to constantly monitor the app. By watching a course section, they receive an in-app notification and email the moment a relevant swap or giveaway becomes available — all collected in a dedicated notification center with a live unread badge.
- Tailored Academic Experience: The platform natively understands the University of Sharjah's structure. By capturing a student's gender and major, it automatically filters out irrelevant sections.
- Visual Schedule Builder: To prevent overlapping swaps, students can visually master and preview their potential schedule right within the app before finalizing changes.
🧭 Platform Architecture & Routing
Every single aspect of the app is engineered to funnel students toward successful, stress-free schedules.
1. / (Home Dashboard)
The landing hub after sign-in. It surfaces a personalized snapshot rather than the raw feed: your active-post and pending-match counts, the total credits in your latest saved schedule, and the electives offered this semester (department and university baskets) filtered to your major. Targeted announcements surface here on arrival.
2. /browse (The Feed)
The central marketplace. The feed natively applies intelligent filtering to only show posts (swaps, giveaways, and requests) that match your declared major and gender (preventing campus overlap).
- Capabilities: Users can instantly search this curated feed by Course CRN, Course Name, or Course ID.
- Interest Flow: For giveaways and requests (which aren't swaps), an "I'm interested" action lets a student share their own contact with the poster by email — the poster's number stays private unless they explicitly choose to publish it.
- Section Alerts: This is where students set up watch-a-section alerts (see
/notifications).
3. /post (Creation Hub)
The hub where students officially register a "Have" or "Want" section.
- Logic: It dynamically parses the user's major to only allow submitting posts for relevant courses. It enforces constraints—preventing users from exceeding the 5 active post maximum, keeping them from submitting identical swap requests, and ensuring no bad data permeates the system.
4. /matches (Swap Transactions)
When the matching engine finds a reciprocal 1-to-1 swap between two students, a record is created here in a Pending Match state. (Giveaways and requests don't use matches — they're coordinated through the "I'm interested" flow on the feed.)
- The 24-Hour Timer: Matches are securely held for exactly 24 hours.
- Dual Acceptance Logic: Only when both independent parties click "Accept" inside the 24-hour window will the match finalize and exchange contact details. If a match is declined or expires, the original post is auto-requeued and placed back on the market instantly.
5. /schedule (Visual Builder)
An advanced graphical permutations tool natively built into the platform.
- Complexity Management: It dynamically renders lectures, linked labs, and tutorial combinations so they never overlap.
- Preferences: Students can customize gap minimization rules, instruct the system to pack classes into compact days, strictly avoid Arabic or English designated classes (e.g., stopping section "01A" if English is preferred), and cleanly ingest "Major Elective" baskets flawlessly.
6. /instructors (Instructor Schedule)
A lookup tool that lets a student search any instructor by name and see the full weekly schedule of class times they teach this term — useful for vetting a section before swapping into a different professor.
7. /profile (User Settings)
The core setup and onboarding view that forcefully captures necessary metadata required to feed the logic loops for the rest of the application.
- Settings & Preferences: Beyond identity fields, students control their app theme and a set of email notification preferences — independently toggling swap-match, interest, and watched-section emails off. In-app notifications always remain on; these toggles govern email delivery only.
8. /notifications (Notification Center)
A unified in-app inbox for everything time-sensitive, surfaced via a live unread badge on the bottom navigation bell.
- What lands here: new swap matches, interest in your giveaways/requests, and alerts for course sections you're watching. Opening the page marks items as read and clears the badge.
- Section Alerts (Watch a Section): Straight from the feed, a student can subscribe to a course — optionally pinned to a specific section — for the active term. The instant a matching swap or giveaway is posted, the watcher receives both an in-app notification and (unless opted out) an email, turning the platform from pull to push.
9. /admin (Admin Console)
A gated, admin-only operator console for running the platform.
- Overview: At-a-glance analytics — user, post, and match counts, recent activity, type/status breakdowns, and top courses by post volume.
- Management Tabs: Users, Posts, Semesters, Majors, and Courses (search and edit a course's attributes — credit hours, major memberships, and elective type, including shared university Basket electives with per-major exceptions).
- Announcements: A rich-text broadcaster precisely targeted by major, gender, and/or specific users, with per-announcement dismissal tracking (see exactly who dismissed each one).
10. /auth (Authentication)
Dedicated, fully secure authentication proxy built seamlessly onto Supabase's OAuth/OTP ecosystem. It guards all internal APIs to protect student data.
🔐 Data Collection, Storage, and Privacy Philosophy
CourseMate handles sensitive data carefully. Here is exactly why we collect what we do, and how it is managed:
| Data Point | Rationale For Collection | Storage & Privacy Guarantees |
|---|
| Gender | UoS strictly segregates campuses (e.g., Main/Men vs Main/Women). Without knowing a user's gender, a male student could inadvertently accept a swap for a female-designated course section, which is physically impossible to attend. | Held in your profiles row and governed by the same Row-Level Security that guards all profile data — never surfaced in the UI, used only in the background as a campus route-filter. (Supabase encrypts data at rest, which guards against physical media theft; RLS is what controls application-level access.) |
| Major | Prevents the system from showing Engineering swaps to a Med student. It's the central pillar that enables the /schedule route to dynamically look up a user's applicable Department Electives. | Retained in profiles and queried passively via the UI. |
| Phone Number | Crucial for the final step of a swap coordination where users sync up on WhatsApp to click "Drop" in the actual university portal at the exact same millisecond. | Hidden by default. For swaps, a number is locked behind our /matches Row Level Security (RLS) and is unveiled only once both parties hit "Accept" on a pending match. For giveaways/requests, the poster may either opt to publish their number publicly, or keep it private — in which case an interested student's contact is sent to the poster by email via the "I'm interested" flow, so the poster's number is never exposed. |
| Student ID | Defends the platform against spam. Guarantees that active accounts are verifiable, enrolled University of Sharjah students. | Visible internally for trust & accountability metrics. |
| Full Name | Personalizes the interactions, injecting a human element into automated notifications (e.g., "Karam accepted your swap request!"). | Publicly associated strictly with your respective swaps/giveaways. |
🛠️ Technical Stack Overview
- Frontend Ecosystem: Next.js (App Router), React 19, Vanilla CSS Modules (to maintain highly isolated, premium and modular styling across dynamic pages).
- Backend & DB Layer: Supabase (PostgreSQL implementation layered with extremely tight Row-Level-Security rules locking down the APIs).
- Automations & Background Services: Scheduled cleanup tasks (
/api/expire-posts, /api/expire-matches) gracefully strip away old, stale requests so the active feed remains permanently healthy. Event-driven dispatchers (/api/notify-match, /api/notify-interest, /api/notify-watchers) write in-app notifications and send transactional email via Resend, respecting each user's per-category email preferences.
👩💻 Authors & Credits
Data Source: Our platform relies on robust real-time course metadata retrieved from the UoS Curriculum Scraper.
📜 Copyright and License
This project is open-source and licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.
