Platform guides course decisions
Final-year University of Otago medical student Josiah Bugden has somehow also found time to establish a rapidly growing platform to help students navigate university life with confidence.
Mr Bugden (25) is a finalist in the Momentum student entrepreneur category in the KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards for CourseSpy, which is about creating transparency in higher education.
What started as a side project has evolved into a platform with more than 250,000 visits, which helps students make better and more informed decisions about their tertiary study.
CourseSpy was born of Mr Bugden's own frustrations as a student. Prior to embarking on his medical studies, he did a science degree.
He said while there were some necessary papers, it required having to "build your degree" and he found it tricky figuring out which papers to take.
All he had to go off was the paper title and maybe a couple of sentences, yet there were so many options available, he said.
In his hall of residence, friends would pass around Google documents, sharing course advice, and it got him thinking — and tinkering.
Teaching himself to code, he built a basic website for students to leave course reviews and also tips and tricks and discovered people liked it.
While the website was very unpolished, he saw how students were using it and decided it might be worth putting in more effort and seeing if he could expand the offering and make a viable business.
Over last year, he became involved with Startup Dunedin and the Audacious business challenge and Momentum, the national student-led investment committee programme.
That provided him with advice on how to take the "next steps" and included getting a team around him, which included his brother Sam, to work on it.
What the team wanted to create was a one-stop hub for students to get course advice and it had evolved to be more than a review site, he said.
It allowed students to plan their degrees, calculate entrance scores, manage timetables, choose accommodation and access curated study resources.
CourseSpy now hosted more than 15,000 course reviews across all eight New Zealand universities and had had about 250,000 page visits, he said.
In a recent user survey, the overwhelming majority of student users reported they had changed their future course selections based on insights gained through the platform.
In the past year, CourseSpy had also launched Mastery Modules — interactive, adaptive question banks designed to guide students through each lecture and improve their long-term retention and grades.
Those modules were built by a team of tutors and high-achieving students to ensure high-quality, course-specific learning support.
Mr Bugden said his goal was to continue the rapid growth of CourseSpy by adding tutors and textbooks and further developing Mastery Modules for CourseSpy's proprietary learning platform while looking to expand overseas soon.
He acknowledged the juggle between his medical studies and CourseSpy had been "tricky" to manage but said he had enjoyed learning about business and having a great team around him had been pivotal.
He now wanted to involve more people in the project to ensure it was sustainable into the future.
He was passionate about medicine and was looking forward to working as a doctor next year and it was likely he would take on more of a consulting role with CourseSpy.
The winners will be announced at a function in Auckland on October 22.
sally.rae@odt.co.nz
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