Social sites research through CourseRank

Social sites such as FaceBook, Orkut, Flickr, MySpace and many others have become immensely popular. At these sites, users share their resources (e.g., photos, profiles, blogs) and learn from each other. On the other hand, higher education applications help students and administrators track and manage academic information such as grades, course evaluations and enrollments. Despite the importance of both these areas, there is relatively little research on the mechanisms that make them effective. Apart from being both a successful social site and an academic planning site, CourseRank provides a live testbed for studying fundamental questions related to social networking, academic planning, and the fusion of these areas. In this paper, we provide a system overview and our main research efforts through CourseRank.