Welcome to Academia documentation
Academia is a modern academic project management platform for universities. It supports collaboration across students, advisors, coordinators, department heads, and evaluators (committee) through the full lifecycle of projects and defenses.
This site documents how the product works and how to work with the open-source Next.js application that powers the experience.
The documentation is organized for different kinds of readers. Some people need the fastest operational route into onboarding and role ownership. Others need the lifecycle map from group formation to final defense. Contributors and integrators usually need the technical layer: environment variables, API behavior, tenant routing, and the structure of the frontend application.
Use this page as the main entry point when you want to understand where to start, how the guides fit together, and which reading path matches your goal.
What Academia covers
Academia is not only a dashboard for submitting files. It is designed to support the real academic operating model around student projects.
At a practical level, the platform covers:
- department onboarding and first-run setup
- invitation and role-based access across academic staff and students
- student group formation and approval before proposal work begins
- proposal drafting, review, approval, and project activation
- milestone delivery, advisor feedback, and revision loops
- evaluator assignment, scoring, defense scheduling, and late-stage readiness
- tenant-aware frontend and backend behavior for multi-institution deployments
That means the docs need to serve both product understanding and implementation understanding.
Fastest route through this guide
- Start with Getting started if you want the product and onboarding picture first.
- Start with Roles and dashboards if you already know the audience you care about.
- Start with Project lifecycle if you want the end-to-end academic workflow.
- Start with Environment and API if you are integrating with the platform.
How this documentation is organized
| Section | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Product overview, onboarding order, architecture, and local setup |
| Platform | Role guides, lifecycle guides, proposal flow, milestones, evaluation, defense, and staff oversight |
| Developers | NEXT_PUBLIC_API_BASE_URL, headers, and multi-tenant behavior |
Start by reader type
| Reader | Best place to start |
|---|---|
| Department head or operations lead | Onboarding and first setup |
| Coordinator, advisor, evaluator, or student | Roles and dashboards |
| Someone tracing the whole academic path | Project lifecycle |
| Frontend contributor or integrator | Environment and API |
| Contributor debugging tenant-aware behavior | Multi-tenancy |
Fast entry by intent
| If you want to understand... | Open this page |
|---|---|
| how a department starts using Academia | Onboarding and first setup |
| which role owns what in the platform | Roles and dashboards |
| how the platform moves from group formation to final defense | Project lifecycle |
| how the system is built across frontend and backend | Architecture |
| how tenant-aware integration works | Multi-tenancy |
Use the sidebar to move in order, or jump directly by reader intent. The strongest docs paths now support both role-based reading and workflow-based reading.
Recommended reading paths
Product-first path
Workflow-first path
- Project lifecycle
- Student group formation and approval
- Proposal review and approval
- Milestone delivery and advisor review
- Evaluation and defense workflow