Open Course List

The subject of this entry no longer exists in Davis or is a former version of something that came afterwards.All information here is for historical reference only.

The Open Course List was a computer generated list accessible from the UC Davis Registrar's website. The list showed which classes were still available as of the last update time as well as how many seats remain. It was a valuable resource for the savvy student with an eye on a particular class. The information reported also reflected the post-printing modifications of the course catalog for that particular quarter.

The Open Course List was discontinued in January 2012. It was replaced by "Class Search Tool," an un-cURLable (and thus un-greppable) web interface. The following page is left as is as a testament to the awesome days when the registrar made such data freely available instead of hiding it behind a search form. This is what it used to look like. The Aggie Editorial Board misses it, too.

During Summer Advising the open course list could be hard to understand because of the seat-release process, whereby the university allows only opens a few seats in a course for registration for each group of new students (e.g., if a course has an enrollment cap of 25 students, then the university may allow only one or two students to register for that particular summer advising group). Seat release is especially applied to popular courses.

Siscast is a popular and powerful class schedule planning tool that uses the open course list data to formulate schedules. As of recent months, Siscast has not been updated (or simply inaccessible).

• I found nowhere on siscast a mentioning that they wouldn't sell my UC Davis email to spammers, so I haven't registered. If anyone is more experienced with this website than I am, I wouldn't mind some info. — S
• OK, I found out you can register a fake email addy. — S
• You don't have to log in or use your email address to use Siscast...unless you want to use the newer features like events and stuff.

KenBloom also wrote some Perl scripts that can be used to work quickly and easily with the open course list data.

2007-11-07 12:20:52   It looks like Siscast is run by an independent developer, so I'm pretty sure their goal isn't to sell your email to spammers. Lots of coders have personal projects, but they don't want to bother with putting up disclaimers, privacy policies, and terms of agreement. —TimJ