A web-based student-run platform that could act as a central repository for all the college study material needs

Acadmate is a student-run academic resource management system that allows users to upload and download study materials such as previous years’ question papers, books, notes, and other resources to help them prepare for exams efficiently.

Nowadays, subjects taught at any university in any individual semester have a vast syllabus and we can’t complain about it as covering every topic becomes necessary from our career’s perspective. So sometimes, it becomes difficult for the student to cope up and cover all of it just before the examination. After asking and discussing with my friends and peers, I found out that the major cause of this is the lack of availability of proper academic resources such as apt study materials and more importantly, past years’ question papers.

So, this motivated me to eventually create a web-based student-run platform that could serve as a central repository for all the college study material needs, which would thus help many students.

Project Objective

The main objective of my project is to cater to the academic needs of the students of our university. Lack of accessibility to proper academic resources is the problem I want to solve through my web application. Due to the shortage of time and server limitations, I have just enabled the upload and download of question papers but shortly, I plan to implement the transfer of other resources as well.

The user interface has been designed in a minimalistic way and as soon as the user opens the portal, they are greeted with a landing page that asks them to sign in through Microsoft (through their college id). Once they have done it, they are redirected to their profile which is empty at the beginning but they are provided with the buttons to upload or download a particular question paper. If the user chooses to upload a QP first, they need to fill a multistep form in which they need to fill the subject details and upload the QP in .pdf format, size being less than 10MB. After they have clicked the submit button, it becomes available to each individual who fills in the download form and requests for the QP of the same subject and same branch.

The uploaded paper even shows on the user profile. When the work is done, the user could log out from the application thus redirecting them to the home page from where they initially started. The home page even lists some features of our platform making the students realize its benefits.

Learning Outcomes

• Learned how to use Firebase which is powered by the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure directory to handle user authentication using university Microsoft accounts.
• Configured and stored the question papers on Google Firebase Cloud Storage over a secure connection through their API, which provides data replication for extra reliability as well as quick and easy access.
• Learned how to structure code to ensure future scalability by using reusable components with custom hooks.
• Helped me understand how a real-world application works and how to efficiently use GIT version control system and Github.
• Handled the deployment of this application and brought this project to the real world with the help of vercel. I asked my batchmates to test out the application, and received positive feedback regarding the ease of use and informative user interface.

The entire layout and user interface of the website was designed by Manavendra Sen on Figma.

Future Prospects

Considering the database schema, cloud storage and the code folder structure, it will be easy to extend this web app to books, assignments, and much more. I would also likely implement a reward system in which users would get some points for uploading the appropriate resources; There’s a possibility to add a reporting system too. Last but not the least, an admin portal which could eventually approve the uploading of items and delete unnecessary materials if any.

I may add features to help students by providing solutions and thus monetize the platform to help with the server costs if the user base grows. This app can also be easily scaled across other universities with some minor changes to the database and how the forms are handled.