Tuesday, July 23, 2013

  Since The University of Texas at Austin is my major target school to transfer, news and opinions about them interest me very much. A recent news that I encountered is about UT board of regents' investment on an online academic tool known as MyEdu. This website, according to my UT friends, is an useful tool that helps UT students to plan their schedules and research about their future professors. It also contains features that help students to find internships and career planning using a specified major. While many UT students find the system useful, some people like TheDaily Texan is skeptical about their use of school money. Since 2011, UT have invested 10 million dollars on MyEdu to aid them aid UT students. According to The Dailey Texan's research, 90 percent of UT undergraduate students now use MyEdu compare to 75 percent before 2011. Clearly, UT helped MyEdu, but the question is, did MyEdu use the money wisely to help UT students? I never used MyEdu since I don't go to UT yet, but my friends who had been using MyEdu before 2011 are saying that they haven't felt anything different. One of the main features that students find it the same is class update. MyEdu doesn't tell students whether the class is open, closed, or cancelled. Now I doubt UT's investment. If UT really wanted to help their students using MyEdu, why not share their data base to MyEdu? Also, many of its features can be substituted by many other websites like RateMyProfessor and Google Calendar. Sure MyEdu tells students about available UT classes, but its inability to update the status of those classes doesn't match the full potential of 10 million dollar investment. Furthermore, MyEdu's other features like job research and profile are only used by 5 to 15 percent of the website users according to The Daily Texan. This proves that these features are either inefficient to aid UT students into their career or not advertised well. Since UT is my main target school, I really don't want the school to waste student's tuition money. Sure MyEdu is helping UT students, but are they doing 10 million dollar job? The Daily Texan says not so much. I agree with them if the facts that they present are true. 

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