Building APIs for the University and the Student

Campus Technology: A few years ago, three innovative Brigham Young University (UT) students decided to develop an improved version of the university registration system interface. They "screen-scraped" the official registration pages and created their own site. Some students used it to create their schedules, but they still had to enter their course selections into the official registration system.

"It showed that students wanted to build tools on top of the university system to make students' lives better, but we were forcing them to screen-scrape and not allowing them to actually interface with the university system," said Phil Windley, enterprise architect in BYU's Office of the CIO. He has helped develop the concept of a university-wide application programming interface (API) to standardize how BYU exposes its data and business processes to app developers — and make it easier to connect to campus systems.

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