| Extending CollegeInfoDesk at Your School |
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By extending CollegeInfoDesk, you can make some of the most exciting features of the site available at your school.
If you are an administrator, student body representative, bookstore representative, or just a talented screen-scraper, you can help!
Some of the new things that students will be able to do once CollegeInfoDesk is set up at your school include:
| • | Quickly create easily-readable, printable schedules that they can use for themselves or share with friends if they wish. |
| • | Find all of the books for their classes immediately. |
| • | Compare new and used prices textbook prices, with links to buy the books directly from the bookstore. |
| • | Browse through courses to help create their next term's schedule, while being able to quickly access professor evaluations matching each of the classes |
| • | Surf the site with a customized look and feel specific to your school that fosters school spirit. |
These are in addition to all of the standard CollegeInfoDesk features including the popular book-exchange and professor evaluation systems.
And best of all, it's completely free! To get started, please read more below. If you have any additional questions after reading this information, please feel free to contact us and we'll help you out as best we can.
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| Bookstores |
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To integrate your bookstore with CollegeInfoDesk, there are several basic pieces of information that you can provide us with.
If you would like to be able to automatically update our site with the click of a button when you change information on your site, please
refer your technology team to our easy to use API section.
Information that you can provide us with includes:
| • | A mapping of course numbers to the corresponding ISBNs. Also, you can (if you wish) include information on whether each book is required or optional for the course. |
| • | New and used (if available) prices matching ISBNs. |
| • | Link structure to link to a book at the bookstore's site (optional). |
| • | Link structure to create a shopping cart of many books at the bookstore's site (optional). |
By providing us with this information, your bookstore will have an instant audience with our users. By default they can see a book's list price and Amazon price (with a link to buy from Amazon), but with your cooperation, now they will also be able to see
the bookstore's prices and quickly buy from there instead with one click. College bookstores are often less expensive and are considered more convenient, so they will generally win out when compared side-by-side to Amazon. However, without the information from
your school's bookstore, we are unable to provide more than just the Amazon links.
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| Schedule Maker (Course Listings) |
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By providing us with course information, your students will have a one-stop source to help them plan for their next term's schedule.
They will be able to browse courses, and easily check professor evaluations corresponding to the courses. When they are done, they
can create a graphical version of their schedules that they can print out and use as a reference, or share with their friends.
To get the schedule system set up fully, please give us as much of the following information as you have available:
| • | A list of the academic terms in the system (many schools set up a few semesters into the future). |
| • | A list of the fields of study for each term. |
| • | A list of the courses and optionally an informational blurb about each course. |
| • | A list of each section of the courses. This can include instructor names, credit hours, whether or not the section is a lab, when and where the course meets, etc. |
Since this information changes frequently at many schools, it is recommended that you refer someone in your technology department to the API Section so that they can use our API to allow you to update the entire system
with the click of a button.
If this information is provided in addition to the bookstore information, students will then be able to find all of the books for their schedule
with one click! Please consider getting the resources together needed to extend CollegeInfoDesk at your school, and if you have any further questions,
we are always here to help.
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