CourseSense is a cloud-native, secure, and scalable platform developed as the final project for the Advanced Cloud Architecting course at Dalhousie University. It enables automated collection, processing, and analysis of student course feedback through a modern serverless architecture on AWS.
Designed with a focus on operational excellence, security, performance efficiency, and cost optimization, CourseSense leverages AWS managed services to provide real-time insights for instructors and academic administrators, replacing manual analysis with actionable data visualizations and alerts.
🔐 Secure Authentication
User management and role-based access via Amazon Cognito with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and session tracking via DynamoDB.
📨 Feedback Collection
Students submit feedback through a web dashboard powered by Elastic Beanstalk, routed through API Gateway to a processing Lambda.
📁 Data Storage
Structured feedback is stored securely in Amazon RDS (MySQL), while raw data and analytics reside in Amazon S3 with versioning and encryption.
📊 Real-Time Analytics
Educator queries trigger Amazon Athena via Lambda to fetch summarized trends, with results streamed back to the UI.
📣 Smart Notifications
Low rating submissions trigger Amazon SNS alerts, enabling quick instructor response to dissatisfaction trends.
📡 Monitoring & Auditing
All interactions are logged with Amazon CloudTrail and visualized via CloudWatch alarms and dashboards for observability.
🛡️ Threat Protection
API Gateway is integrated with AWS WAF for rate limiting and protection from common web exploits.
- Frontend: Web UI hosted on Elastic Beanstalk (Node.js), secured behind a public-facing ELB
- Backend Compute:
- Lambda for:
- Authentication (
auth-handler-lambda) - Feedback submission (
feedback-lambda) - Instructor analytics queries (
query-lambda)
- Authentication (
- Lambda for:
- Storage & Data:
- Amazon RDS (MySQL, multi-AZ)
- Amazon S3 (feedback logs, query results)
- Amazon DynamoDB (session state)
- Analytics: Amazon Athena for querying S3 feedback data
- Networking & Security:
- Amazon VPC with public/private subnets
- NAT Gateway, VPC endpoints, Secrets Manager, AWS KMS
- Monitoring:
- Amazon CloudWatch for metrics and alarms
- AWS CloudTrail for full activity logging
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Frontend | Elastic Beanstalk (Node.js) |
| Auth | Amazon Cognito, DynamoDB |
| Backend | AWS Lambda (Python) |
| Data Store | Amazon RDS (MySQL), S3 |
| Analytics | Amazon Athena |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch, CloudTrail |
| Security | Secrets Manager, KMS, WAF |
| Deployment | Terraform, AWS CLI |
- Response Time: Avg. under 3 seconds for feedback submission and analytics
- Reliability: Multi-AZ RDS, Elastic Beanstalk auto-scaling (1–4 instances)
- Scalability: Stateless Lambda functions and throttled API Gateway endpoints
- Security: Private subnets, IAM roles, audit logging, and encrypted storage
- Cost Optimization: Estimated $7–$10/month, using serverless and intelligent tiering