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Class viewer calendar for MOOCs
Class Viewer is a MOOC calendar viewer. Between Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, there is way too much great stuff out there now, and it may be hard to pick what to take without taking too much at once. This Java application lets you filter classes in various ways, set statuses (yes/no/registered/etc) to classes or individual offerings, and see the whole thing on a calendar.
The data is stored in text files, one for the "static" data and one for statuses. By default they are placed in the current directory, but you can specify a different location, e.g. a Dropbox folder. Location, file names, colors are all configurable via a ConfigFile.
Currently the application supports import of the Coursera course list. They sometimes have transient weird things in their data, so you can choose which changes to apply to your local database. You will need to add EdX and Udacity stuff (and whatever else you please) manually to the text files for now.
At the moment the application does not talk back to Coursera, or ask you for user name and password to pull anything personal from them. Setting the status to "registered" and actually registering for a class are completely independent.
This is what the result looks like.
The left-most frame lets you filter classes by category, language, and university (Coursera's parameters) as well as by the status code you assign to the class. The filters are applied to both the course list (next window to the right) and the calendar view. Clicking on a class in the list will bring up details, including all offerings of the class. You can additionally filter offerings in the calendar view by status - this will not affect the list.
To change status of a class click on the colored status column in the class list. To change the status of an offering, click on the colored status column in the details page. Colors in the calendar correspond to the offering status. Clicking on an offering in the calendar view will select the corresponding class in the list and load its details.
The bottom right view lets you pull the updates from Coursera or EdX and apply all or some of them. There are not too many user checks in this version, so make sure categories and universities are added before or together with courses that use them.
Also, the code is still "alpha", so I recommend making copies of your data from time to time so that some lingering bug does not destroy all your carefully set status info.
Getting it
Here is a jar file. Also, the source code is obviously visible.
Running it
Double click, or
java -jar CourseViewer_1.1.jar
or
java -jar CourseViewer_1.1.jar -i path/to/settings.ini
Note: Java 1.7 is required.
The settings file lets you tweak some parameters. Currently it's read-only, i.e. there is no way to change parameters from the application itself. By default the application looks for a file called settings.ini in the current directory. All values not explicitly specified are set to defaults described here. In particular, the status and static files are placed in the current directory by default.