Coursicle app comes to East Carolina

A screengrab from the official Coursicle at ECU webpage.

With the anxious time of class registration approaching at East Carolina University, an app has become available for students to use with the aim of making the process as smooth as possible.

Available for free download on both the App Store and the Google Play Store, Coursicle is an app that helps students figure out what classes to take by providing a variety of schedule-related features, such as instant filter-based searching and visual schedule planning on a calendar.

Coursicle’s launch for ECU came two weeks in advance of registration week, which started yesterday and will end March 30. Since its launch in 2013, Coursicle has been implemented in many North Carolina colleges and universities, and various students at ECU are open to this alternative to schedule planning for their Fall 2017 and Summer 2017 schedules.

“While Banner Self Service and Pirate Port’s Schedule Planner is nice, I would like to see what Coursicle has to offer,” said freshman communication major Jourdan Carr. “It’s nice to try new things, especially when it comes to planning. I would say that I’m a very organized student, so I’ll have to wait and see if Coursicle can take my organization to the next level.”

The visual schedule system allows users to make multiple schedules, so that students can make backup schedules or even a degree plan complete with a list of courses necessary for their major to graduate. The Coursicle app also features a notification system, which will notify users of available seats in their requested classes.

By being linked to Facebook, Coursicle allows students the option to compare and contrast their schedules with their Facebook friends and see what classes those friends are considering in real-time. With Coursicle’s textbook search option, users can find textbooks for each of their classes and compare the prices of their school’s bookstore with prices on Amazon, AbeBooks and Chegg.

“Sometimes you don’t get the best deal on textbooks at Dowdy or even at UBE,” said Carr. “It’s nice to know that while scheduling my classes I can buy books using the very same tool.”

Only 22-years-old, founder Joe Puccio has already made a name for himself in the world of technology and social media. As a freshman enrolled in UNC Chapel Hill back in 2012, Puccio was someone who had trouble with enrolling for classes necessary for graduation. Being that university administrators didn’t have a sufficient solution for his troubles, he said he decided to create his own. With the help of co-founder Tara Aida and months of collaborative brainstorming, Coursicle was born.

“As an incoming freshman, you can imagine that trying to plan a course schedule for five hours was stressful. Writing it by hand made it an even more difficult and frustrating process,” said Puccio. “I ended up getting one of the five classes I selected, and after that I started writing a script that would text you when classes were available. Five years later, the text notification script became an app and tool that myself and others could build their class schedules with.”

Coursicle has evolved into a nationally recognized form of software that supports more than 100 schools, with a little over 19,000 users nationwide. Always looking to improve, the two co-founders have encouraged users of the app to provide feedback to them via social media or reviews through the Google Play or App Store.

“We read every single piece of feedback we get and we made a contact forum on the site to make it easier for students to email us. We respond in 24 hours and we make sure the submissions come directly to our email,” said Aida. “A lot of the features that exist in Coursicle are a result of student feedback. It’s important to listen to the students who use Coursicle in order to make the app better for them.”