CS 278 / SOCIAL COMPUTING / STANFORD UNIVERSITY

BetterEd

A real-time student collaboration platform that helps students discover classmates working nearby and form spontaneous study groups without needing an existing social connection.

Next.jsReactTypeScriptFirebaseSocial Computing

LIVE PRODUCT

Open BetterEd →

The Problem

Finding classmates to study with is often more difficult than it should be. Ed Discussion is primarily asynchronous, group chats are fragmented, and office-hour structures vary by class. The problem is especially difficult for students who do not already have a strong social network in a course.

The Idea

BetterEd creates a live layer of academic activity where students can post what they are working on, where they are studying, and when others can join. Instead of having to know someone already, students can discover collaboration as it is happening.

MY ROLE

Frontend Engineering + Product Design

I worked primarily on the frontend experience, helping translate the team's social-computing concepts into a functional Next.js product. My work focused on building and refining interfaces for discussions, study sessions, user profiles, course enrollment, and the broader navigation experience while coordinating with the backend implementation.

TECHNICAL SYSTEM

Building a real-time collaboration platform

BetterEd was designed as a technically focused CS 278 project. The frontend uses React and Next.js, while Firebase supports authentication, Firestore data, and real-time platform behavior. The technical system is directly tied to the social behavior we wanted to encourage.

DISCUSSION BOARD

Academic conversation beyond the classroom

The discussion board allows students to browse questions, study plans, and shared resources by course. Users can filter discussions by their own classes, search across topics, and see activity from people in their network.

We wanted this area to feel useful without becoming another overwhelming social feed, so the design centers course context, clear discussion hierarchy, and lightweight participation.

REAL-TIME SESSIONS

Find classmates working right now

The core BetterEd interaction is the study-session system. Students can check in immediately or schedule a future session, select a course, describe what they are working on, choose in-person or virtual participation, and control the visibility of the session.

Our early prototype testing showed that students were much more willing to join existing sessions than create their own. That changed our design philosophy: joining needed to be easier and more prominent than posting.

COURSE CONTEXT

Collaboration begins with academic context

Student profiles connect users to the courses they are actually enrolled in. This allows BetterEd to personalize discussions and session discovery while maintaining a stronger sense of trust than open anonymous communities.

The project also explored an Honor Code-aware system where collaboration permissions could be associated with individual courses, embedding academic-integrity rules directly into product behavior.

MODERATION + ANALYTICS

Designing the system behind the community

BetterEd is not only a student-facing interface. The admin dashboard provides visibility into platform activity, including users, discussions, sessions, groups, reports, and participation patterns.

Building moderation and analytics into the platform helped us think about BetterEd as a full sociotechnical system rather than just a collection of frontend screens. Social behavior, moderation rules, trust, academic integrity, and technical architecture all influence one another.

PROTOTYPING + RESEARCH

Testing the behavior before building the product

Piggyback Prototype

Before committing to the full platform, we recreated the core BetterEd behavior inside existing Slack group chats. Students posted when and where they were studying, allowing us to test whether people would actually respond and show up.

Joining > Posting

One of our clearest findings was that students were more comfortable joining an existing study session than initiating one themselves. The product therefore needed to optimize for lightweight participation rather than assume everyone would become a contributor.

Location Matters

Location-based organization performed surprisingly well. Students often cared as much about who was nearby in Gates, Huang, or a library as they did about finding someone from one specific course.

Existing Spaces Are Powerful

Office hours and established work sessions provided natural anchors for participation. Rather than inventing an entirely new behavior, BetterEd could make existing academic activity easier to discover.

SOCIAL COMPUTING

Designing for people, incentives, and systems

Contribution Pyramid

We expected many users to browse without posting, so BetterEd lowers the barrier to participation through lightweight joining behavior.

Descriptive Norms

Surfacing active sessions can make collaboration feel normal by showing that classmates are already studying together.

Cold Start

Professors, TAs, and existing office hours can seed activity so the platform has value before a large student community develops.

Sociotechnical Design

BetterEd treats technical rules, community expectations, academic integrity, and product behavior as one connected system.

RESPONSIBLE DESIGN

Designing for the failure cases too

Grind Culture

A feed full of late-night study activity could accidentally make constant productivity feel expected. Activity should be framed as optional collaboration rather than a competition.

Zero Response

If nobody joins a student's session, the product can create a feeling of rejection. BetterEd needs to explicitly design for this case rather than treating it as an edge condition.

Privacy

Real-time study posts can become live location sharing. Approximate locations, reporting tools, and stronger privacy controls are important safeguards.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The product changed when we stopped asking users to create behavior

BetterEd started with the question, “How do we get students to post study sessions?” Testing pushed us toward a better question: “How do we make collaboration that students already want easier to discover and join?”

That shift changed how we thought about participation, location, trust, moderation, and technical architecture. The strongest design decisions came from observing what students actually did, not assuming how they would behave.

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