University students, with their busy schedules and endless assignments, often struggle to remember due dates, upcoming tasks, and available course resources. Currently, courses use various educational platforms to navigate through coursework, causing confusion for students. We are developing AutoRemind, an opt-in notification tool that delivers personalized reminders for upcoming tasks and course resources via students' preferred communication platforms. AutoRemind is built to integrate with Learning Management Systems (LMS) to extract real-time data on student progress, assignment status, and available resources. This microservice, built for the GradeView platform, will serve as a centralized hub for students to gain access to all course deadlines and resources from a single source of truth, simplifying the process of tracking and completing tasks. This tool is not specific to computer science classes, so it potentially has very broad reach, hopefully leading to improved academic performance and increased course engagement. We aim to reduce administrative burdens on instructors and support mastery learning, enabling students to progress at their own pace while maintaining consistent academic performance.

This study explores the impact of a flexible retake policy on student performance in a university CS0 course that followed a mastery-learning approach. Students were given the opportunity to retake the exams by re-doing the questions they had initially answered incorrectly. Performance was analyzed by gender and race, revealing that women earned higher final grades and made more use of the retake policy compared to men. Underrepresented minority (URM) students had lower final grades and completed fewer retakes compared to students in the majority group. To evaluate the effectiveness of the retake policy, we developed the Exam Recovery Ratio (ERR) metric. Our findings showed that, while increased retake opportunities led to higher final grades overall, gains were not evenly distributed - higher performing students disproportionately benefited, widening the grade distribution. This highlights the need for a more detailed examination of equity-focused policies in educational settings.

Gradeview is an innovative and ongoing project presenting a comprehensive dashboard designed to cater to the needs of both students and educators, offering a centralized platform for monitoring and managing course progress. This work in progress draws its data from a single Google Sheet ensuring that updates, such as new grades and categories, are seamlessly reflected across all student and administrator dashboards instantaneously. Gradeview leverages a plethora of other technologies that can drastically increase both student and educator productivity beyond the classroom setting. For instance, it introduces an interactive mastery learning Concept Map customized for each student. The organization structure of Gradeview promotes completion of work regardless of timeline so as to benefit student mental health and increase mastery of core concepts in the class. Our Director module enables the automated management of students' grades for those students working past the term deadline. In order to facilitate the implementation of these new dashboard modules, we developed the project to be an easy-to-use microservice architecture that can automatically track individual and overall student performance through course grading metrics.