YU Knowledge Hub revised-v02
The YU Knowledge Hub project proposes a unified platform for discovering university workshops, courses, and events, registering for them, following up, and documenting them, after the student team identified a gap between the abundance of opportunities and students' ability to access them in a timely manner.

Some university opportunities are missed not because students are not interested, but because they arrive late, get lost in a crowded email inbox, are posted in a group that the student does not follow, or the date is forgotten after registration.

From this daily problem, a team of students from the Master of Business Administration program at Al-Yamamah University initiated the development of the YU Knowledge Hub project as part of the Entrepreneurship course (ENT 554) in the MBA program under the supervision of Dr. Yasser Al-Malawi. The project is based on a simple idea:
to gather available learning and development opportunities within the university in one platform, instead of leaving the student to search for them among scattered channels, announcements, and registration forms.

The MBA student team: Amjad Al-Saleh, Noha Al-Dharmani, Maha Al-Dosari, Majd Al-Bunyan, Walaa Al-Attar, and Suha Al-Humaidi presented a prototype for a platform that helps students discover workshops, short courses, guest meetings, professional programs, and innovation events, then register for them, receive reminders, and document the activities they have completed.

The Problem is Not the Scarcity of Opportunities

The idea starts from an important observation:
universities may provide a good number of workshops, events, and programs accompanying the courses, but providing the activity does not necessarily mean that the student knows about its existence or can access its complete information.

The project team described the current situation as fragmented communication; announcements arrive via email, WhatsApp groups, verbal announcements, peers, and various channels followed by departments and colleges. A student may know the title of a workshop from one channel, then search for the date, location, and registration link in other channels.

The result is that the problem, according to the team, does not lie in the absence of activities, but in the difficulty of discovering, managing, and following them.
A student may miss the registration deadline, forget an activity they previously registered for, be unaware of a change in date or venue, or complete a workshop without having a single record of what they accomplished throughout the semester.

Here, what seems to be a small communication problem turns into an issue related to the student experience and the value of university education; because learning does not happen only inside the lecture. Professional workshops, specialized meetings, and short certificates can help students build additional skills, expand their network, and better prepare for the job market.

What Did the Students Say?

Before designing the solution, the team conducted interviews with six students from different academic levels.
Five of them, about 83% of the sample, reported that they had previously missed an activity or learned about it after the appropriate time had passed.
The same percentage indicated that they find it difficult to view all available opportunities in one place.

All six participants supported the existence of a central platform that facilitates discovering and registering for events.

These results do not represent all Al-Yamamah University students; the sample is small and intended for preliminary verification of the problem. However, it provided the team with an early indication that the problem is worth testing and developing, rather than moving directly to building an application based on unverified assumptions.

The team identified three main sources of the problem:
the scattering of announcements across multiple channels, the lack of a unified page that allows comparing activities by topic or date, and weak follow-up after registration, including confirmation, reminders, and updates on dates.

This approach in entrepreneurship is known as problem validation; that is, ensuring that users are indeed facing the difficulty that the project aims to solve before investing time and money in developing the full product.

From Fragmented Announcements to a Single Journey

To illustrate the problem, the team mapped out a virtual journey for a student wishing to develop her skills outside the curriculum.

The journey begins when she receives an announcement about a workshop, then searches through multiple channels for details, moves to a separate registration form, and waits for a confirmation message. She may forget the date due to the absence of a reminder, and then find no record of her activities or the certificates she obtained after attending.

In contrast, YU Knowledge Hub proposes to streamline these stages into a single digital pathway.
The student logs in with her university credentials, specifies the areas of interest, and then suitable opportunities appear, with clear information about the topic, date, location, organizing body, and available certificate.

The student can register directly and receive immediate confirmation and a QR code to prove attendance, then receive reminders before the activity date.
After completion, the activity moves to the “My Learning” section, becoming part of a record that shows what the student attended and what programs she completed.

The proposed platform does not replace the Learning Management System through which courses, assignments, and grades are managed, but complements it by organizing learning opportunities accompanying university life.

A Prototype Before Building the System

The team did not present a final application ready for operation, but designed an interactive prototype that simulates how the platform might work.

The prototype is a trial version that shows the product's appearance and usage path before incurring the cost of full programming and operation. This stage allows monitoring users while performing tasks, discovering points of confusion, and then adjusting the design early.

The team tested the prototype with five users, asking them to complete 30 tasks related to selecting interests, searching for activities, registering, and following up on upcoming and completed opportunities. A total of 29 tasks were successfully completed, with a completion rate of 96.7%, while the average usability rating was 4.6 out of five.

The test results prompted the team to improve the way interests are selected, clarify search filters, unify navigation between screens, and create separate sections for upcoming, completed, and saved activities, along with enhancing the clarity of icons and texts.

These numbers do not mean that the platform has proven its operational success; they measure the ease of use of a limited prototype with five people.
However, they indicate that the team did not just present the idea, but monitored the experience of real users and made adjustments based on their behavior.

Value Beyond Student Convenience

The project places the student at the forefront, but it also proposes potential value for university administrations.

Having a unified platform may help organizing bodies reduce the repetition of registration forms, confirmation messages, and manual follow-ups.
The platform can also generate data on the most requested topics, the most engaged categories, registration and attendance rates, and activities that need to be increased or redesigned.

Thus, the data becomes not just numbers for counting, but a tool that helps the university answer practical questions:
What skills are students interested in?
What times are most suitable for them?
Which programs attract high registration but suffer from low attendance?
And where should training resources be directed?

The team presented six potential impacts of the project, including increasing student participation, improving attendance through reminders, reducing administrative burden, supporting learning outcomes, producing indicators that aid in decision-making, and enhancing the student experience within the university.

Praise for the Idea.. and a Note for Development

Dr. Yasser Al-Malawi considered that the team chose a specific and realistic problem within the university, noting that some undergraduate and MBA students are unaware of the workshops and programs available, despite what professional certificates and accompanying activities can add to their experience and record.

At the same time, he suggested expanding the validation phase to include the Executive Education Center and the entities that organize the programs; because testing the idea with the service provider is as important as testing it with the end user.

This observation reveals the next challenge facing the project.
Transitioning from a student model to a viable platform requires connecting different entities, identifying who is responsible for updating data, ensuring the accuracy of dates, linking the system to the student's identity, protecting their data, and determining the mechanism for issuing certificates and proving attendance.

The project also needs a broader trial involving a larger number of students, and representatives from colleges and departments organizing events, before measuring its actual impact on registration, attendance, and participation.

Nevertheless, YU Knowledge Hub provides an example of what can happen when an entrepreneurial project starts from a clear daily experience: not every gap needs an unprecedented invention; some opportunities begin by rearranging what exists and linking it in a simpler and clearer journey.