Extensible Web Platform for University Academic Discussions

The idea behind building forums for academic discussions is to promote collaboration and make everyday growth of students seamless and as painless as possible. The reasons why such forums are not popular in universities include content moderation, lack of specificity and discovery and lack of technical resources to deploy and customize the forums. We propose a readymade web-app platform model that provides an easy-to-use plugin and extension system to radically extend the functionality of forums to suit the needs of the administrators. It will be ready to deploy easily with specific features for academics related discussions so that users can use them to interact with each other. In the reference implementation, we demonstrate how they can be used to build forums for reviews exchange, share cabs and autorickshaws, and general-purpose discussions. The forums we built have been tested with VIT students to positive feedback from more than 80% of students.