By Julia Ben-Asher ‘14

Graphic by Nicole Maselli ’14| The Lafayette

Moodle may have itself some competition. Created and launched by five sleep-deprived Lafayette students, a new management website called Academic Connect debuted its market site on Monday.

It all began in 2010. During their freshman year, John Frazier and Ryan Warrier were up studying together for a chemistry final. A quick four a.m. study break led to them chatting about their classes and the issue of technology used ineffectively.

They concluded that mixing an academic course management system, like Moodle, with a social network could make education more efficient, Frazier said.

Academic Connect was born.

Warrier, originally a biology major, taught himself computer code that summer. He enrolled in an introductory social media course in the fall and changed his major to computer science. Frazier, a physics and engineering major, began researching the business and marketing side of things.

By the end of 2011, the workload had grown massively and competition for immediate results in the software industry was intense. They both dropped out of Lafayette to work on the project full time.

Through mutual friends, the pair found Justin Chando ’13, whose experience with web design and visuals helped the pair expand. By fall 2012, Dorde Rakic ‘15 and Kien Hoang ‘15 had also joined the team.

The full website will be released in January at no cost to users, and  will boast features created from students’ perspectives that the team believes will set it apart from Moodle and other existing systems.

A sleek, bright design, neatly organized, is immediately appealing. A newsfeed of each class’s activity, an easy document uploading process, and a text editor with different math tools were designed to “get students’ questions answered quicker and to have peers answering each other’s questions, taking some weight off the teacher,” according to Frazier.

Other features will include messaging and video chatting, a program enabling users to draw on PDFs with a computer mouse, document sharing and editing, an organizer for events and assignments, and what the team describes as a completely new take on grading.

“I like it,” Professor Gary Gordon said. Rakic worked with Gordon on an EXCEL applied math project dealing with social media this summer. “I’m seriously considering trying it out next semester,” he said.

Gordon believes that, despite the frustrations it can cause, many professors are comfortable with Moodle. Some, however, may be willing to give Academic Connect a try.

The project has not been all fun for the team. Every field of the website has to be monitored at all times, so team members are constantly working. The members taking classes have learned to do schoolwork more efficiently. But considering the time the team devotes to the project, there still are not enough hours in a day, even with their all-night “hack-a-thons.”

“I blink once, I’m good. I blink twice, I fall asleep,” said Hoang.

“Red Bull helps a lot,” Rakic added. “Our lifestyle is not what my mother would think is the best one, but I enjoy it. There is awesome adrenaline in something live going on.”

The workaholic lifestyle is important for those pursuing work in the software industry, but the entrepreneurs are learning other valuable career tools as well.

“We’ve learned a lot of new skills we can’t learn in a classroom,” Hoang said. Warrier noted web design as one of these skills.

So what now that the market site has been launched? “Now everything really begins,” said the team. Continuing to convince professors to use the application will the be “the key piece.”

“We have the energy to knock on professors’ doors every day,” Rakic said, “to make sure everyone’s happy. Which is going to make our app awesome.”

They will also continue to ask students’ input and collect and analyze user data, or “growth hack,” to figure out which versions of the site are the most popular.

Frazier expects the website may hit some resistance on campus, but he is not worried. “We really think that the community will really like what we have to offer,” he said.

Besides creating the website, the team has hosted a TED talk, recently held an information session for faculty, and is currently creating a video explaining the project.

Within twelve hours of the market site’s launch, the Academic Connect Facebook page had over 100 likes.

“Now our goal is to always have more likes than Red Bull can tabs!”Rakic said.