ANDROID APPLICATION FOR CUNY ONLINE SERVICES 1

Building Android Application for CUNY Online Services

Using Web Scraping Technology

Leji Li

Professor: Maria Vint

The City College of New York

ENGL 21007

November 28, 2019

Draft 1
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Abstract

CUNY online services have a poor performance in the mobile platform. As parts of the

CUNY online services, CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks have different

entrances which use the same set of login information, and their UI (user interface) are

not adaptable to phone’s small screen. CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks are

three services that CUNY students mostly relay on, thus their poor performance in mobile

platform will inconvenience the students’ academic life. A research was conducted to

collect CUNY students’ feeling toward the experiences of different CUNY online

services on phone, as well as to find how to get the information from a website without

using official APIs and display these data using an Android application. A survey shows

that few CUNY students were satisfied with the experiences of these online services on

phone (20.3% for CUNYfirst, 36.7% for BlackBoard and 17.7% for Degreeworks) and

58.2% of the students were interested in having an application to integrate these three

services. The following step is to build an Android to scrap the information from these

three services and then display.

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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 Degreeworks 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
ANDROID APPLICATION FOR CUNY ONLINE SERVICES 4

opinion, 22 out of 41 responded answers complain that the CUNYfirst cannot fit the small screen

on the phone; 17 out 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
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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.).

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.

An Android developer Shubham Sejpal (2017) scraped the yudiz blogs using Java codes and

displayed the information he got in an Android app. He used Jsoup framework to get the blogs

source page from yudiz server and abstracted the useful data from that source page. His method

provides a way of scraping information only using Android platform. The issue is that to get the

blogs information doesn’t require user login. To get the information from CUNY servers,

maintain the user login status is necessary.

A survey was conducted to collect students’ using habit in these three services, students’

feedback about their experiences and how willing a student would like to have a integrate access

method to these three services. From the survey, the following questions should be answered:

Are CUNY students satisfied with the on-phone experiences of CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and

Degreeworks? If they are not satisfied, what disappoints them? Are they willing to have the

integrated application for CUNYfirst, BlackBoard and Degreeworks on phone? These questions

give how important designing a modern application would be.

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

student life forum. This survey targets on the current CUNY students.

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 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
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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.

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.
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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 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
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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 the degree of satisfaction about the experience on phone, only 16 people was satisfied

with the CUNYfirst experience on phone while 39 or the students were not. For the BlackBoard

the data is 29 people satisfied verse 25 people didn’t. For the Degreeworks, only 14 people had

positive feeling compare to 29 people had negative feeling. This data shows that the CUNY

students were not satisfied with these services’ experience on phone. For the CUNYfirst and

Degreeworks, more students had negative feeling and there’s the opposite situation when talking

about the BlackBoard. Because BlackBoard is the only services among the three having a

updated page design which can adapt to the phone’s screen and rearrange the elements.

For all students who voted poor 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 technology that fits (Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Chambers, L.). Web scraping has
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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.

Conclusion

By analyzing the survey data, the service has new design for phone, which is

BlackBoard, receipted more positive feedback, but in general none of the services could have a

degree of satisfaction more than 40%. And there’re 58.2% of the students would like to have an

integrated entrance to access these three services. The following task is to build a mobile

application to make it easier to get access to and operate these three services on phone.

Furthermore, action to request CUNY provide official APIs could be conducted since more than

half of the respondents have the interest to use the application that integrates the CUNYfirst,

BlackBoard and Degreeworks.

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Reference List

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

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

Sejpal, S. (2017). Yudiz. Data scraping in Android using Jsoup (Java HTML parser).

https://www.yudiz.com/data-scraping-in-android-using-jsoupjava-html-parser/

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

handbook, 124-127.

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.

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

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