ModuleReview lets students rate their professors and courses

Education in university can be a mixed bag: The quality of a module or course is very dependent on the professor that’s teaching it and the curriculum he or she has planned.

Some lecturers can’t teach even if their lives depend on it, and that mean a near-empty lecture hall abandoned by disgruntled students who would be better off reading their notes on their own.

ModuleReview aims to help students make better decisions by being a one-stop location for peer evaluation of courses.

Students can leave comments on the content, teaching staff, workload, and personal experiences while undergoing the module, and leave scores for each of these components.

All anonymous, of course.

The founder, Jace Liew, then a National University of Singapore (NUS) student, started the site in 2006 but recently launched a third version three of their service. Ryan Lee, the “brand officer”, joined after a year.

They have been given a grant of S$50,000 (US$40,000) by the YES! Startup scheme, a government fund for young entrepreneurs.

An idea like ModuleReview is nothing new, of course. In the United States, sites like RateMyProfessors.com and MyEdu.com have been popular for quite a while.

But there’s nothing quite like it that spans the Asia Pacific region, as far as Ryan and Jace know. They hope to eventually expand to Australia, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan — as the home page indicates — but are focused on Singapore for now.

Already, they are getting about 75k pageviews per month, hitting 300k around peak periods, which are during module selections and school orientations.

Their content are mostly about the courses in NUS for now, although they are encouraging users to submit reviews through incentives like F&B coupons and contests.

So far, they have around 10k modules listed, but only about 1,700 reviews.  Which means they still have a long way to go when it comes to user adoption.