Instructor API

From: support-group@developer.ucsb.edu <support-group@developer.ucsb.edu> On Behalf Of Darragh Burke <darragh at ucsb.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2019 5:23 PM
To: support@developer.ucsb.edu
Subject: Instructor List API Suggestions

Hey folks!

First of all, thanks for the great work on the UCSB APIs. It's super exciting to have access this amount of information, and I really appreciate you guys making it available to student developers - as far as I can gather, this is above and beyond what most universities do and it's much appreciated!

I noticed that you guys have an Instructor List API planned. This would be super useful for my project, and I thought of a couple of suggestions for it. You may already have had these ideas, in which case, feel free to ignore this email! Anyway, here's what I came up with:

- Pulling data from http://www.identity.ucsb.edu/people_finder/. This already has a list of faculty & staff that seems fairly comprehensive? It may or may not be desirable to include staff as well.
- Allow API consumers to search for instructors based on the "instructor names" provided by the Courses API. For example, GOLD lists the instructor of CMPSC 140 as "YANG T". It would be cool if we could query for instructors using the phrase  "YANG T" and get back all the information about Prof. Tao Yang.
- I imagine you already plan to include instructor emails, but Office Location would also be very useful.
- Associating portrait photos with instructors where possible. Up to date photos might not always exist, but it would be great to provide any that do.
- Potentially, including a link to the instructor's web pages where they exist? Many professors have their own online pages. However, these are definitely not standardized across departments.
- Including graduate student instructors in this API would be an awesome bonus, but definitely harder to achieve since this dataset probably fluctuates wildly every quarter.

This is definitely a very idealized wishlist and I realize that many of these may not be worth the time investment. Even the simplest instructor API would be great to have! Just thought I would throw some ideas out there that might be interesting.

Best,
Darragh Burke