Just as students are wrapping up fall quarter classes and beginning to think about courses for the winter, a new course guide Web site has made its way online.

Launched yesterday, CourseRank (http://courserank.stanford.edu) is a parallel version of the course guide system previously released this fall by the ASSU and the Office of the University Registrar. While not a competitor to the Axess site, CourseRank and the team behind it look to improve upon the groundwork already set by the ASSU and the Registrar.

“We are hoping to brand this site under the ASSU name and ensure students that it is made completely for their benefit,” said ASSU President Hershey Avula ‘08 in an email to The Daily. “The new release should act in some ways as a more easy to use and centralized virtual advisor, course planner and course guide than even the current Axess Web site, and we are very excited for this.”

Computer science students Benjamin Bercovitz ‘09, Filip Kaliszan ‘09 and Henry Liou ‘09 started CourseRank last spring as part of a class project. Working with the Undergraduate Senate and the Registrar, the trio joined forces with Stanford InfoLab this fall and were given access to the same class evaluations published on Axess.

With this information, the team established its own site — courserank.stanford.edu — in hopes of developing a definitive Stanford course guide that is both informative and easy to use.

“We wanted to make our site much more user-friendly than the Axess one,” Kaliszan said. “As you’ll notice, [CourseRank is] very fast compared to the Axess site, where pages load pretty slowly. We focused on making our interface cleaner, more snappy and also faster.”

Other than easier navigation, Kaliszan noted that CourseRank offers more freedom for comments that are in line with student interests — rather than the professor-centered feedback of much of the Axess data. Avula added that the student-written, qualitative comments are a marked bonus over what is available on the current Axess site.

Other features are also unique to CourseRank; for example, the site features a weekly schedule planner and GER tracker for users. In addition, Avula hopes that by winter quarter the site can also serve as a used textbook exchange among students.

“Overall, the CourseRank site will serve as a model for the Web site that the Registrar hopes to replace Axess with,” Avula said, “and will provide students with information managed, created and published by themselves about courses at Stanford.”

Where CourseRank is headed and how the project will fit with other sites is up in the air, according to Kaliszan. No official conversation has been initiated regarding integrating the Axess and CourseRank Web sites, but Kaliszan noted that University Registrar Thomas Black has shown interest in the site and its potential.

“Tom Black seemed very excited about it, and it fits well with his vision for one site being the full thing — class information, comments, etc.” Kaliszan said. “In the end we’ll have to judge by students’ interest between the sites, but it seems like the Office of the University Registrar is interested in integrating somehow in the future.”

Beginning with yesterday’s launch, CourseRank site traffic will be monitored into and through the coming quarter, as is being done with the Axess site. According to Kaliszan, however, no official deadline has been set for when the sites would be compared.

For now, the project remains one of many set in motion by the ASSU, which is looking to address the academic needs of students. Much of this depends on site feedback, according to ASSU Executive Cabinet Chair of Academic and Career Initiatives Phillip Hon ‘10.

“We as ASSU would also love to take suggestions on how this portal can continue to serve the needs of students,” said Hon, noting that he and Avula can be contacted — at pchon at stanford.edu and hershey at stanford.edu, respectively — for comment on how CourseRank and other ASSU initiatives can be improved.