The Source Guide, a student-operated course evaluation website, changed its name to CourseNet this year and will emphasize the workload of courses and students’ opinions of professors and their courses.

The CourseNet webpage, located at www.bu.edu/coursenet, includes course evaluations, student comments, professor feedback, syllabi and required reading. The information comes from course and professor evaluations given out at the end of the semester. BU’s Office of Information Technology processes the information and then CourseNet’s Editor-in-Chief Melanie Ryan reviews it.

Ryan, a College of Communication senior, said the current CourseNet page acts as a ‘temporary Band-Aid.’

Ryan said the staff is working to ‘create a system so all evaluations will be done on the internet and eliminate paper evaluations’ by May. Questionnaires are currently the same for all classes, but new evaluations will be specialized by department.

CourseNet’s faculty advisor, College of Arts and Sciences professor Alan Marscher, said the website’s transformation began when a group of students wanted to redesign the Source Guide.

The new course evaluation system has a ‘closer connection with the faculty,’ he said, and the site’s partnership with the Center for Excellence in Teaching demonstrates its goal of supporting teaching.

Marscher said CourseNet is also considering other changes to update the information on courses.

‘The new questionnaire attempts to make productive and collegial discussions better represented,’ he said.

Elissa Carole Singer, a CAS junior, used the Source Guide in past semesters and said she was unsatisfied because it did not provide enough information.

COM junior Elizabeth Esten said she would use CourseNet though she has not used the Source Guide.

‘I didn’t know about it, but now that I do, I would definitely use it for the future and even use it to look into professors that I already have,’ she said. ‘But overall I base my classes on their times.’

Currently, the website primarily provides evaluations of CAS courses. Classes in the English and Psychology departments are not on the site because they use their own evaluation systems.

Ryan said CourseNet hopes to eventually develop a universal evaluation system for all BU classes.