The idea of such social computing applications seems wonderful, yet like everything else, they still have their potential problems.
The campus scout’s biggest problem could be the information feed. In the current situation, information about a building may not be that detailed. It is hard to find existing applications that contain the detail information of each floor inside each building on the campus. To achieve this, one possible solution is to hire some professionals and collect all the detail information, yet this usually takes a long time and is quite expensive.
Moreover, the dynamic information feed could be a problem. Due to the voluntary nature, students may not want to update their status or make comments about their surroundings once they are inside a building. They may give wrong information based on their own opinions and feelings. Thus such information feed is volatile and not very dependable. Rewarding mechanism may be able to encourage students in more active participation.
Course Advisor is facing the biggest issue of getting cooperation and data from the school staff. First of all, the course content, discussions and previous presentations or assignments may have some level of confidentiality and not allowed to be shared. Secondly, by rating a course or the professor openly and let everyone see the result may not be appropriate. There is currently no obvious solution to these issues.
Thirdly, public opinion is not always correct, it may be misleading. Even if it is correct, it may induce the situation where some certain popular courses are always fully booked and those unflavored ones have no one for registration. In this case, some courses may be modified accordingly to attract more students to solve the issue to some extent.
The ihelp application is generally estimated to have a more positive future, the only concern may be that more cases of harassment is likely to appear. Yet it is more depending on the nature of the participants. One possible solution is to employ a system monitoring team who would interfere with harassment matters when needed.