Budget cuts have impacted the number of classes offered at SRJC. The administration tells us it will be more important than ever to plan our courses in advance and to use our priority registration if we have it. This is solid advice, but to really plan our college career we need information. The web has a few tools that can make it easier.

First up is the slew of sites that let you express your opinion about a professor’s performance, such as Rate My Professor. These sites are a place for students to rate and share their experience with a given professor and leave feedback. While it can be useful for getting an idea of what a teacher is about, it does lend itself to extremes, because those most likely to rate a professor are the students who are very happy or upset.

With that said, a few minutes spent reading through the comments can be helpful if you remember that these sites are nothing more than anecdotes and opinions.

Next up is myEdu, a free web application that offers a collection of tools to plan a path through college. The sites works with schools to get access to course catalogs and data about student performance categorized by teacher. Using this data, it is easy to find the professors that produce the best grades in their students. Whether this is because they are good teachers or easy graders is something the software can’t tell you. Combining the grade information found on myEdu with the anecdotal information found on Rate My Professor, it is possible to get an idea of what each teacher has to offer.

myEdu does more then give you another way to look at the course catalog, it also offers a roust schedule planning tool. Once you have your schedule worked out myEdu will also try to help shop for books. Unfortunately the SRJC has not yet listed the books required for summer courses so myEdu has not been able to help me. That said it looks like it could be a useful tool.

In addition to the short-term scheduling tools myEdu offers a degree planning app, allowing students to plan for transfer requirements and plan for courses to take once they reach a four-year collage. It is possible to lay out the classes you plan on taking across your entire college career.

In addition to planning their course load the app also allows the user to see the required courses in a large number of programs from a large number of schools. This allows the undecided student an opportunity look at what careers a given program could lead to. More than just a list of possible careers, the site breaks each career down by salary, education level of people in the field and activities of that career.

The last item in the suite of services offered by myEdu is a tool for helping find financial aid, a feature I cannot comment on as I have not explored it yet. However, if this tool is as well built as the others are it may go a long way to simplifying the search for school funding.