Amid the stress of course enrollment, students looking for guidance are turning to a new cache of wisdom: OnCourse, a student startup with a sizable following of just over 4,750 users and growing, according to its founders. 

Students previously relied on sources of advice like older students or Carta, the more established course planning service and review bank. Launched in 2016 from a Stanford research project, Carta has long been the course planning site of choice for many students, according to previous Daily reporting. 

According to the Carta website, 95% of undergraduate students “use Carta regularly.” But recurring outages on Carta — particularly during the lead-up to course enrollment — have frustrated users. 

“Carta crashes all the time,” said Sage Wu ’27.

Now, OnCourse founders promise their site will stay up even during peak times. 

“I really like OnCourse,” said Caeley Woo ’26. “My favorite thing about it is mostly that it loads quickly, because Carta loads so slowly.”

A colorful blue and purple site sporting a schedule, catalog and four-year course planner, the new site integrates typical elements of Carta with several new features. Just like Carta, OnCourse allows students to view and plan courses for the next four years, as well as see reviews from each quarter. 

“I always like to use OnCourse as a first choice just because it’s just so much more reliable,” Juliet Bell ’27 said. 

OnCourse also allows students to compare classes against each other, see grade distribution data from 2020 and share their schedules with friends. The font on OnCourse is larger, and the data visualizations take more varied forms, like pie charts representing the class year breakdown for each course.

Bell said the larger text was a big draw for her: “I’m dyslexic, so small text tends to be a lot more difficult for me to read.”

Missing grade distributions in Carta was a gap for many students, especially pre-med or Ph.D.-bound users, according to previous Daily reporting. The University stopped supporting Carta’s grade distribution feature in 2020 due to the “disruption” from COVID-19 and “changes in grading implemented at that time,” University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote in an email to The Daily. 

According to its website, OnCourse uses the last available data from 2020 to model grade distributions. 

Three sophomores — William Huang ’26, Niall Kehoe ‘26 and Aly Sultan ’26 — founded OnCourse last summer after noticing deficiencies in Carta.

“I just called up Niall, and was like, ‘Yo, we could do better, right?’” Huang said. 

Kehoe, a fellow computer science major, signed on immediately. The duo started working on the platform the next day. A few weeks later, they brought on their friend, Sultan, who had startup experience. As the non-technical cofounder, Sultan said he did not even need to see the demo before joining the team, describing Kehoe and Huang as “the two smartest guys” he knows. 

“I’m actually pretty much a Luddite,” Sultan said. “I hate technology.” 

Just before fall quarter enrollment last year, the team launched the platform. On the first day, 1,000 users signed up for OnCourse, Kehoe said. By winter quarter enrollment, he said they had grown to over 3,000 users. 

According to the founders, by the day of spring course enrollment on Wednesday, they reached just over 4,750 users. 

“I originally thought that having a large number of users would be a challenge, but actually thus far we’ve handled it pretty well,” Huang said. 

For now, students seem pleased with the services provided by OnCourse. But some have also suggested changes for the site: Woo said she hopes OnCourse will add the option to search through reviews by keyword, like Carta allows for. 

“Whenever I want to search reviews, when I’m first exploring a class, I do it through Carta,” Woo said. “But when I want to plan my classes, I do it through OnCourse.” 

The OnCourse founders said they prioritize timely responses to criticism. On Nov. 27, a Fizz user noted that OnCourse and Carta sort through reviews differently, giving students a warped perception on the breakdown of reviews for a course. By Nov. 28, the OnCourse founders had fixed the issue.

“We’re super happy that a lot of people have reached out to us with constructive feedback,” Sultan said. “I think that’s the whole point, right? We tried to help people out and they brought some really good ideas for us.”

According to the team behind OnCourse, most student feedback was positive. 

“I think it’s really great the way it is,” Bell said when asked if there was anything she’d change about the site. “I’d be kind of bummed if they changed it.”

Oriana Riley contributed reporting.