SmartSyllabus
Five syllabi, five formats, one semester. We built the thing that reads them and plans it for you.
Five syllabi, five formats, and about three weeks before most students give up on the calendar they built in September.
SmartSyllabus reads the PDFs and builds the semester for you. Deadlines, weightings, and the whole term in one view. Flask on the back, React on the front, Gemini doing the parsing.
It started as a CSC301 project and became a real venture through ICUBE at UTM, which is where the interesting decisions started. We ran a usability study in July, watched people get lost in our own onboarding, and rewrote it around what actually confused them rather than what we assumed would. Before scaling outreach we had to work through incorporation, PIPEDA, WCAG and AODA, and who exactly owns the text of a syllabus. Then we reframed the whole thing as a social enterprise, which changed which partnerships and which funding were even available to us.
It’s live at smartsyllabus.ca. The parsing is good. Convincing a whole department to adopt it is the part I’m still figuring out.