A digital platform built for students at Monash University. Real unit reviews from students, provided with historical SETU data.

🌍 Website · 🤝 Contributing · 🚩 Issues · 📋 Changelog

What is MonSTAR?

MonSTAR helps Monash University students make informed decisions about their unit selections. The platform aggregates student reviews and SETU (Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units) data from 2019 onwards, providing both qualitative experiences and quantitative metrics for thousands of units.

Students can browse units, read peer reviews, compare SETU scores across semesters, and contribute their own experiences after completing units.

Features

MonSTAR provides several features for exploring and reviewing Monash subjects:

• Unit Search - Search by unitcode or the name, additional filtering by teaching period, faculty, etc
• Student Reviews - Read and write reviews with ratings across enjoyment, simplicity, usefulness
• AI Sentiment Overviews - Gemini AI overviews for units, reviewing existing student review sentiment
• SETU Data - Historical SETU results from sem 1 2019 up to most recent (authentication required)
• Unit Pathways Map - Interactive graph showing unit pathways, prerequistes and future requirements
• Google Authentication - Monash student/staff verification through email verification
• Review Interactions - Like/dislike reviews with notifications
• Unit Tags - Dynamically assigned tags like "WAM Booster"

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ (backend dev) and Angular CLI (frontend dev)
• MongoDB (local or Atlas cluster, you'll probably need this)
• Google OAuth credentials (for authentication, optional)

Dev Setup

Local Development

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/wired-projects/monstar.git
   cd monstar

2. Install dependencies for both frontend and backend

   make install

3. Configure environment variables

   See backend/.env.template for all available options.

4. Start the development servers

   make dev

   The frontend proxy configuration will automatically route API requests to the backend.

Local Development (manual)

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/wired-projects/monstar.git
   cd monstar

2. Install dependencies for both frontend and backend

   # Backend
   cd backend
   npm install
   
   # Frontend
   cd frontend
   npm install

3. Configure environment variables

   See backend/.env.template for all available options.

4. Start the development servers

   # Backend (runs on localhost:8080)
   cd backend
   npm run dev
   
   # Frontend (runs on localhost:4200)
   cd frontend
   npm run start

   The frontend proxy configuration will automatically route API requests to the backend.

Production Build

# Build frontend
cd frontend
npm run build

# Start backend
cd backend
npm start

Production deployments should set DEVELOPMENT=false and configure appropriate CORS origins.

Contributing

MonSTAR was built by Monash students. Contributions are welcome from the community.

Before starting work on a feature, please read the Contributing Guide for:

• Development environment setup
• Code style and conventions
• Pull request process
• Testing requirements

You can contribute by:

• Reporting bugs or suggesting features via GitHub Issues
• Fixing existing issues
• Improving documentation
• Adding new features (after discussing in an issue first)

Data Sources

MonSTAR's unit catalog and SETU data are sourced using tools developed by Sai Kumar Murali Krishnan:

• monash-handbook-scraper - Unit metadata extraction
• unit-outcome-miner - SETU survey data aggregation

Contact

Developed by: WIRED Projects Team, Monash University
Primary person of contact: Email [email protected] or add me on discord at proxy_dev
Issues: GitHub Issues

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.