ANDROID APPLICATION FOR CUNY ONLINE SERVICES 1

Building Android Application for CUNY Online Services

Using Web Scraping Technology

Leji Li

Professor: Maria Vint

ANDROID APPLICATION FOR CUNY ONLINE SERVICES 2

Introduction

The City University of New York (CUNY) provides its students a set of online services to handle

school-related conveniently and digitally. Among all the online services that provided by CUNY,

CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreework are the three services we CUNY students use the most.

CUNYfirst provides tools on student admission and financing. Students can check their class

schedule, enroll for classes, get the unofficial transcript, view financial aid status and pay for

tuition bill through the CUNYfirst. Blackboard is the place that relates to students’ study.

Students can find the class syllabus, get class materials, do homework and check exam grades for

each class on BlackBoard. Degreeworks is graduate-related. Degreeworks has the curriculum for

each student. Students are encouraged using Degreeworks to plan for the class schedule for next

semester. Students can find their GPA, the classes they can take and preform GPA calculation

using Degreeworks.

Even though the CUNY online services are setup to convenient students, some of them are failed

to catch up with the mobilized design and make them difficult to use on phones. From the

survey, we can see that only 17.7% of the students never or almost never use the CUNYfirst in

general, and the data is 2.6% for BlackBoard and 17.7% for Degreeworks. But when the it comes

to asking how often that students use these services on phone, students never or almost never did

jumps up to 22.8%, 17.4% for BlackBoard and 62% for Degreeworks, When asking about the

experience of these services on phone, around 20.3% of the responses consider the CUNYfirst

has a good experience on phone, 36.7% for the above average BlackBoard experience, 17.7% for

the Degreeworks and 51.9% of the students vote that the experience of these three services are

under average standard. When asking why CUNY students hold this opinion, 22 out of 41

responded answers complain that the CUNYfirst cannot fit the small screen on the phone; 17 out
ANDROID APPLICATION FOR CUNY ONLINE SERVICES 3

of 45 responded answers consider the navigation of the BlackBoard is confusing; 12 out of 33

responded answers say that the user interface is out-of-date. 58.2% of the students would like to

have a re-design and uniform entrance of the CUNY online services while 38% of the students

thought that it isn’t necessary.

When using CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks these three services, we usually find that

if we login one of them, if we can access other CUNY online services without making another

login. Saying I’ve already logged in the CUNYfirst, if I am going to visit BlackBoard, instead of

showing the login page, the browser will re-route us to the student’s dashboard of the

BlackBoard. By tracking the routing chain we can see that the BlackBoard index page will ask

the browser for CUNY login information, if the login information is already exist, the index page

will guide the user to student’s dashboard, otherwise, the index will jump to the CUNY login

page and ask of user login, so that the browser can have and storage the login information.

The login information was stored in a structure called Cookies (Zakas, N.C.). Cookies has an

attribute called domain, only when the request to the address having the same domain with the

cookies holds, that request asks the browser for the specific cookies (for the CUNY online

services the domain is cuny.edu). Whenever a student interacts with the CUNY online services,

the browser will send out a structure called request, and the service’s server will send back

another structure called response. The request has a header, which will wrap the cookies that the

server needs to verify; the request will have an URL, which tells to where this request should be

sent; the body of the request will host the additional information that the server needs. For the

response, it also has a header. The header of a response sometimes packages new cookies that the

server wants the browser store for further use. Similar to the request, the response also has a

body, which contains the data spent by the server (Bei, T.).
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My purpose is to simulate the browser request by wrapping the request header and URL on

Android platform, and then accept the response from the server so that I can bind the data to the

specific Android view. The Android app will combine the CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and

Degreeworks using this method.

Method

In order to find out is it necessary to have the CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks

combine together, a survey was created using Google Forms service. The survey was sent

through WeChat, a WhatsApp-like platform, and post the survey link to the City College’s

student life forum.

The survey has 10 multiple choices, 3 semi-open checkbox choices and 3 open responds. The

survey can be divided into four sections. The first three sections have the same layout and ask for

students’ using experience on CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks. For these sections, the

first question is a multiple-choice question asking about how often a student use these online

services. The data of this question will show how important of a specific online service to

students’ study life. The second question of these sections is asking how open a student uses the

specific service on cellphone. This question shows how many students are willing to use the

specific service on their cellphone. The third question of these sections collects how a student

uses the specific functions on the cellphone, such as checking schedule or finding class materials.

These data provide the idea which functions should be included into the re-designed UI. The

fourth question of these sections asks for how satisfied a student feels when the student visit the

specific service on the cellphone. The fifth question of these sections is a open question asks for

a student’s feedback on his/her feeling of the specific experience on cellphone. After these three
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sections of questions, the last question asks a student would he/she likes to have a re-designed UI

for these three services.

Result

This survey received 79 responses in total. For the CUNYfirst section, 83.6% of the responses

used CUNYfirst on desktop browser more than sometimes. 49.3% of the responses used

CUNYfirst on phone more than sometimes. The most function students used is checking class

schedule, this option takes 69.6%. The rest options that have more than 30% occupation are

accessing other CUNY online services, which has the occupation of 38%; the checking financial

aid status option has an occupation of 38%; the enrolling classes option has the occupation of

36.7%. 20.3% of the students had positive feeling on their CUNYfirst experience on phone.

For the BlackBoard section, 88.7% students used BlackBoard more than sometimes. 50% of the

students used the BlackBoard on their phone. Checking class assignments has the highest

occupation, which is 79.5%; Checking grades has the occupation of 59.5% and getting class

materials has 53.2%; the following options that have the occupation higher than 30% are doing

class assignments (32.9%) and finding professor’s information (31.6%). 36.7% of the students

had the positive feeling on the BlackBoard experience on phone.

For the Degreeworks, 25.3% of the students used Degreeworks more than sometimes. 12.6% of

the students used Degreeworks on phone very often. Checking current GPAs and planning for

next semester’s schedule are the two major functions the student used on phone. 17.7% of the

students had the positive Degreeworks experience on phone.

58.2% of the students liked to combine the CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks together to

a re-designed UI.
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There are 50 students used CUNYfirst more than sometimes in total, and 22 of them were

unsatisfied with the CUNYfirst experience on phone, which occupies 44%. 57 students used

BlackBoard more than sometimes and 17 of them were unsatisfied with the BlackBoard

experience on phone, which occupies 29.82%. 8 students used Degreeworks more than

sometimes, and 3 of them were unsatisfied with the Degreeworks experience on phone.

20 out of 50 students used CUNYfirst more than sometimes would use CUNYfirst on phone

more than sometimes, and only 8 of them had a positive experience. For the BlackBoard, there

are 27 out of 57 students used BlackBoard more than sometimes would also use BlackBoard on

phone more than sometimes, and 16 of them had positive experiences on phone.

Discussion

From the survey, the data shows that there are 83.6% of the students used CUNYfirst more than

sometimes, and the percentage for the Blackboard and Degreeworks are 88.7% and 25.3% for

the Degreeworks. This data indicates that CUNYfirst and BlackBoard are the two services that

CUNY students relay on the most. But when asking about how often a student use these online
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services on phone, 49.3% of students used CUNYfirst on phone very often, and for BlackBoard

is 50%.

Even though CUNYfirst and BlackBoard are the two major online services that the CUNY

students use the most, CUNY students were not using there two services on phone as often as

they did in general. For the 50 students who use the CUNYfirst more than sometimes, only 22 of

the have the positive experience on phone, while there are 57 students often used BlackBoard

and only 17 of them didn’t satisfied with the experience on phone. From the survey, almost all

students would like to use other platform to access these three services. Among the 50 students

used CUNYfirst often, only 20 of them will also use CUNYfirst on phone. The number for

BlackBoard is 57 students often used it and 27 of them also used it on phone often. This relation

shows that students tend to use CUNY online services on other platform like desktop browser

rather than on phone, having the background that the CUNY online services are important to the

CUNY students and the mobile platform has the high computation power nowadays.

For all students who voted pool phone experience (voted option 1 and 2), their reasons are major

complaining about the UI is outdated and not capable with the phone screen. The similar

responses appear on the BlackBoard section and Degreeworks section. This collection of data

indicates that the CUNY students avoid using the CUNY online services on phone is that these

services are not built for mobile platform. Their UIs are not able to adapt to the modern phone

screen and cause the inconvenience for students to use.

The problem that the CUNY students are facing is that mobile platform, like cellphone, is a more

convenient platform for students to get access to the online services, but the user experience of

these online services are poor because they were not designed for mobile platform. A possible

approaching is to get the information from CUNY online services’ websites, web scraping is the
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technology that fits (Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Chambers, L.). Web scraping has the ability that

grab the raw web page data form the web server. That raw data can be analyzed and be turned

into useful data which can be passed to a mobile application. By using this way, a mobile app

having a better design and the ability to interact with the online services can be built. For the

Android application, HttpURLConnection class can maintain the session and cookies of a

conversation (Chen, S.). This feature can let the application keep the login information from

cookies to visit and grab the data from the services’ servers.
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Citation

Bei, T. (2019). Zhihu. Using python to crawl information from academic system.

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/63916386.

Chen, S. (2018). Medium. Android: Understand cookie and session in Android’s context.

https://medium.com/@martinsuchen3557/understand-cookie-and-session-in-androids-

context-e1520718ccba.

Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Chambers, L. (2012). European journalism centre. The data journalism

handbook, 124-127.

Zakas, N.C. (2009). Human who codes. HTTP cookies explained.

https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2009/05/05/http-cookies-explained/.