Input
Class data, including the departments, as well as the specific classes that are taught during the current term. From economics to philosophy, there will be tabs for each department. In this example picture from CCI at Drexel University in Philadelphia, you can see the categories like “Administration” and “Advising.” For this project, those captions would be departments like “Physics” or “Philosophy.” Then, those subchannels below labeled things like “ask-a-peer-mentor” or “suggestion-box” would be the specific classes running during the term, like “Principles of Economics” under Economics, or “Intro to Digital Humanities” under Digital Humanities.
Student data, including name, student email, and ID. This information will supply security and access to the server. Discord, in particular, struggles with dangers like sex predators, hackers/scams, explicit content, and other issues, just like any social media platform. When attempting to join the server, I propose that all users need to enter and confirm their college email. For example, a West Chester student named John Smith would enter “js1234567@wcupa.edu,” then confirm his valid school email with an automated email sent to his inbox. After confirmation, the student will be able to access the available channels/chats, as well as other students’ information. Having a confirmation system like this will prevent non-students from joining, as well as bot/scam users from filling channels with dangerous content such as pornography, scam links, hateful words, etc.
Output
This West Chester University server will provide a safe, secure, and reliable community for every major of study, available whenever students want to converse about any class. Additionally, a popular server such as this could motivate other universities and colleges to make school-owned/run servers for their students. If these servers become more common, it may influence services like Discord to create templates for education servers, including the built-in email security mentioned above. Projects like this have the capability to domino through other schools looking to improve their support network.