It's a fear every college student has.
A student enrolls in a class that's been part of the degree plan for years, only to find the course isn't being offered that semester.
In some cases, the course hasn't been offered in years due to a lack of student enrollment, but the course will often still appear in the course catalog. As a student, few options are available to know the future availability of a course if the department doesn't provide accurate course scheduling.
University of North Texas sophomore Ben Wilcox recognized this issue and set out in May to make a solution with a website that lets students know how often a class has historically been offered and during which semesters.
"I made this whole website for myself originally because I was looking at my degree plan," Wilcox said.
He said many of the upper-level mathematics courses he was trying to plan for were not offered every year.
"My biggest issue right now is that it's listed on the catalog as something that you can take and it's never offered, or it's offered one time in 2015 and then it's just been listed as a course you can take for the past 10 years."
He recalled speaking to his advisor about taking a class during his senior year, but the advisor had no resource to see if the class had a chance of being available then.
He found the historical course data needed to see when and how often a course is available, but it's only accessible using the UNT Faculty Information System. That system website is more tailored to showing professor profiles and requires going through course histories to find the information needed for degree planning.
"I just was like, okay, well if all the information is available and I need to know when I'm taking this class, then I can just pull all of the professor (information) and see when they offer the class. So I really made the website out of necessity for myself."
'I want people at UNT to succeed'
Wilcox, an Austin native, is double majoring in mathematics and computer science, so careful degree planning is a must to meet requirements.
Despite never creating a website before, he was able to get it up and running in three weeks. It went live in late June.
"There were a few long hours, but I kind of got engulfed into it where it didn't feel like a long time," Wilcox said. "I was just like sitting out in my backyard on my computer for, you know, six, seven hours and I just didn't realize it and it was just dark suddenly, but it was really fun. I really enjoyed making it."
Wilcox's website allows the user to search and select a course to view. It then shows what years and semesters professors have actually taught classes for that course. This might influence what classes a student plans on taking if they see a course hasn't had classes for multiple years or if a course only holds classes in the spring semester.
To create these searchable databases, Wilcox created code that allowed all the data to be "scraped" from the university websites and organized into a file. His website pulls data from this file and displays it in a way Wilcox said he spent half the time of the project designing. He first sketched out his designs on paper before putting it into the website.
"I really want other students to benefit from this because that's why I made it," Wilcox said. "I had all this data, and I pretty much was able to get away with just looking at the raw data and searching through it for my courses, but the reason I put it on the website was so that it's accessible to them, and they can use it for planning their degree. I want people at UNT to succeed."
Francisco Avelino, Wilcox's friend and UNT student, said he was venting to Wilcox about his struggle trying to work with an advisor when Wilcox told him about his website.
"He shared it with me and I was able to find an elective so I can actually graduate on time," Avelino said.
He noted another problem he faced was when searching for classes in the website that students use to enroll. If the class isn't offered that semester, the course won't show in search results, and he couldn't get any information on them.
"You're left wondering 'Is the class even offered anymore? Does it not exist? Am I typing something in wrong? Did the course code change?"
Avelino said after playing around with Wilcox's website he actually found electives he didn't know about that would have been fun to take but they were only available during certain semesters or years so he didn't know about them.
"It's a little disappointing, but hopefully in the future someone else can see it and not run into those same issues," Avelino said.
More on the horizon
Wilcox said he's looking into improving the website by integrating AI that can better search for classes.
"If you want to look for all courses that have one credit hour, or all courses that have this course as a prerequisite or look for the courses that are on this degree track, you can't look for that right now. You have to use some other tool which is not available at UNT," he said.
He's also begun working on an app that tracks a student's academic achievements and statistics for organizations. He says the app would help his fraternity track academic success and encourage other members to improve academically.
Wilcox said he wants to get involved with machine learning and AI with his degree and even pursue a master's degree in the field.
"I really want to get more invested in AI and kind of being on the cutting edge of this new technology that's just revolutionizing every single thing we do."
Wilcox's website can be viewed here.
Dylan Duke is KERA's summer 2025 SPJ news intern. Got a tip? Email Dylan Duke at dduke@kera.org.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gift today. Thank you.
