News - Technology Center

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Add a Certification tracking report in Applicant Review. This report shows the expected certification and endorsements of applicants along with their Basic Skills assessments.
(Complete) Add Enrolled flag to Application records that is set when an applicant enrolls in the program and quarter of their application. This flag will be used to give better “Intent” description, to sync application material with student database, and to provide better visibility about how application will be handled when it is time to delete.
(Complete) Create a Tracked Issue feature in Applicant Review. Tracked Issues already exist in student and we had items marked as “contingencies” in Applicant Review that would transfer to Student. I hope to make both systems clearer by providing the same feature in both systems. When an Applicant is enrolled tracked issues sync from Applicant Review to Student.
(Complete) Built a Tracked Issue launch routine that finds existing Student Tracked Issues to prevent duplication.
(Complete) Revised application Material UI to make the section easier to read and to add Tracked Issue flags. Issues formerly marked “contingency” are now Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Endorsement Requirements could be marked “contingency”, these are now Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Contingency Report is replaced with a Tracked Issue report. This report captures items from Material, Endorsement Requirements, and other manually added Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Added coding for new Grad School application status indicating “Deferred”. This code has the official description and is used to provide better applicant “Intent” description.

Student

(Complete) Add new mentor roles that support PESB reporting. “Lead Mentor” is the default role for first mentor added to a placement, “Mentor” is default for any additional mentors.
(Complete) Add new mentor form that allows user to add Washington Teacher Certificate Number and email address of the mentor.
(Complete) When mentor records are saved during placement edits, automatically associate mentor with a specific institution (school), creating new mentor records as needed. This will allow for safe updating of mentor records within a focused scope.
(Complete) Basic Skills and selected test score evidence is displayed in certification checklist tool. Users have access to choose evidence scores from this interface.
(Complete) Ability to delete certificates through UI.

Test Scores

Change PESB coding for test agencies. Update test score import processes to match new coding.

My main project continues to be a collection of improvements around certification tracking to Student Database and Applicant Review Database that are instigated by state reporting requirements, but should provide some nice improvements for users in the college. Read about the project plan for Certification Updates.

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Use shared Certificate HTML view from Student in Applicant Review.
(Complete) Update Application data model to track whether applicant is pursuing initial teacher certification.
(Complete) Basic Skills are shown in Applicant Review for applicants pursuing certification. Available test scores are automatically match to basic skills categories using college selection logic. Specific scores can be selected by staff.

Complete

(Fixed) Faculty activity report updated for recent change from “ROU” to course “Owners”. Report filter is working again.
(Fixed) Faculty activity report updated for course “Owners”.

Budgets

(Complete) Switch to 2019 Biennium. 2019 is now the default view for Budgets database. 2017 metadata was copied to matching 2019 budget numbers. View can be switched to 2017, 2015 is archived.

Hiring

(Fixed) Request status was not always updating. In order to provide the home page view that shows last step complete and next step needed, appointment requests need to be analyzed after each user interaction. A couple interactions were not triggering this process, resulting in incorrect status on the home page.
(Complete) Updated person information flows down to NARF Worker records. Our college databases import person information from multiple sources (e.g. student, employees). We now have a process where the official UW data will update NARF worker records.
(Complete) Updated the notification from email address to coepay@uw.edu.

Recruitment

(Complete) Added an RSS feed of upcoming recruitment events. This allows the public college website to automatically add those events to its calendar.

Student

(Complete) Move “Completes” to its own nightly update job. Completes (or degrees earned) was part of the large multi-step “Student Update”, but this backward looking record has a distinct time frame from (forward looking) enrollment records and records were occasionally missed. Making this a separate process allows it to have its own job parameters.
(Complete) Update certification data model to better support reporting requirements and business processes. Moved certification to its own database and application namespace for clarity and maintenance. Built an run migration processes to transform existing records.
(Complete) Implement Certification Checklist as a per certificate child record. Previously a checklist applied to a Student. This opens the implementation for custom checklists for different certificate types.
(Complete) Basic Skills, as entered in Applicant Review, are displayed and editable through Student database.

Tech Support

(Complete) Change text encoding scheme to handle wider character set. Ticket system can now handle full UTF8 4 byte character set (e.g. ?). Now that we have email ingestion for ticket issues we are dealing with a wider variety of input.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Automatically increment resource caches during deployment. This ensures that users get latest version of included web page resources (style sheets and JavaScript application).

Certification Updates

We need several updates to our college Student database and Applicant Review database that are instigated by state reporting requirements. Our plan is to implement these changes to meet reporting goals while improving the clarity and utility of the college databases for their primary purposes: advising students and reviewing applications.

Basic Skills Assessment

The college needs to provide test scores as evidence of basic skills competency for students applying to programs that lead to Washington state teacher certification.

Our implementation will start by configuring which programs generally lead to certification and show expected certification, basic skills, and prerequisites on the relevant application pages. Where specific certification and endorsements follow from the program records will be generated automatically. Student Services staff will have the option to adjust or remove certification from specific applications (e.g. student is applying to a certification path program, but not pursuing certification).

Finally the system will automatically match applicable test scores to basic skills categories following a selection priority provided by the college.

Placement Record Updates

Placement records in the college Student database will be updated to support reporting while simplifying the fields of a Placement record. We’ve eliminated fields that were unused or that could be reported at program level.

Reporting requirements have changed for cooperating teacher mentors that work with our students. Our college database will be updated to collect the right information and expose missing data.

Applicant Enrolled

We are adjusting the system so it displays the fact that applicants have enrolled earlier. This will help support onboarding and add clarity about what will happen to specific applications when retention period passes (for enrolled applicants, important material will be available in the college Student database).

Tracked Issues

Several flags and notes in Applicant Review become “Tracked Issues” in the college Student database when an applicant enrolls. But that life-cycle is ambiguous.

We are adding a “Tracked Issue” feature to Applicant Review and those tracked issues (and only those) will become part of the Student record at enrollment. Having a component with the same name and same behavior in both systems should make the life-cycle easier to understand.

Reports

We will be adding several new reports to these two college database that highlight missing records or problem areas. This will help staff research and complete the records and surface issues that need attention.

Cycle 105

Through 7/10/2019

Work Complete

This is a catch-up post for several weeks worth of work. During the end of the academic year and start of Summer I have been focusing on planning for the coming year and catching up on small fix and maintenance backlogs.

Applicant Review

(Complete) Improved matching of application records to enrolled student records for undergraduate programs. Application records are deleted after UW retention period. Selected application material is preserved as part of Student Database record if the application matches to a student enrollment. However the original matching logic was too specific and failed to recognize some undergrad applicants as enrolled students due to different pathway codes (0 or 10) or because they changed major after the quarter they applied for. New matching logic handles those scenarios.

Courses

(Complete) Canceled offerings can be un-canceled through the web UI by user with appropriate role.
(Complete) Changed ROU (“Responsible Organizational Unit”) to “Owner”. This newly labeled entity has the same meaning: a person or group within the college that is responsible for scheduling and staffing a given Course. Added tools for managing Owner configuration. Current Owner data is based on existing ROU records that are out of date and need attention, this field is only exposed on administrative screens until an Owner refresh is completed.
(Complete) Added “Area” as application entity. Previously areas were implemented as ROUs that had their own child ROUs. This added code complexity when associating faculty with areas. Area as its own concept is cleaner.
(Complete) Added Budget Number and Summer Budget Number fields to Course. Provide interfaces for adding Budget Numbers to system. Budget Numbers will be entered by fiscal team to show what budgets pay for staffing.
(Complete) Revised the Course management tools to support assigning course metadata including Wildcard Titles, Owner, Budgets, and Tags.
(Complete) Substantial infrastructure revision that makes the overall application faster and more memory efficient. Additionally this change improves code separation and removes some significant sources of repetitive code making the project easier to maintain.

Hiring NARF

(Complete) Revised the budget entry tool to get rid of the “Split Budget Period” tool. This tool had a bug where user could accidentally shorten the overall budget date range to not match the total appointment period. Plus it was just clunky. New version allows user to edit the start date when adding a budget (after the first, which much match full appointment period). When budgets are added with different start dates existing budgets are automatically adjusted to create a new budget period.
(Fixed) Budget tool could get locked for specific user no longer accepting any input. Tracked down and fixed a problem with form validation that was creating an endless error loop in user’s session data.

Recruitment

(Fixed) Group names that were too long for the database field caused unhandled error. Made the database field substantially larger to handle most cases and truncate input that still doesn’t fit extended field.

Student

(Fixed) Student header block view will work even when the target student is missing expected data. The student database may include people who do not have COE student records: added for certification or had a COE major and then dropped registration or changed majors. The standard student header would fail in these cases keeping the rest of the page from rendering.

Cycle 104

5/13/2019 – 5/25/2019

Work Complete

Appreview

(Complete) Update report filter “Period” to only show years and quarters where applications exist. Follow up to deleting historical applications.

Courses

(Fixed) Add Joint Section tool was not parsing non COE curriculum abbreviations.

Student

(Ongoing) Investigate and test import of Complete (i.e. degree earned) records for students who earned their degree in a quarter they were not enrolled.
(Complete) Add system key to all CSV spreadsheet downloads. Removed database view that provided old implementation of external students.

Tech Support

(Complete) Change database character set to UTF8. This resolved an error creating new tickets when pasting in ticket content with special characters.

Test Scores

(Complete) Build an import process for Praxis test scores.
(Complete) New detail view for test scores, better highlight key score information. Make room for new score annotation tools.
(Complete) Can add notes to test scores.
(Complete) Local UW pass/fail evaluation can be added to test scores. This supports edTPA where UW has a higher pass criteria than WA state. When UW pass/fail is set, it will supersede the agency pass/fail evaluation.
(Complete) Add score tool for local re-submit. Supports recording scores when students re-submit sections of edTPA for local UW evaluation.
(Complete) Change edTPA sub-score labels to match names of rubrics.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Upgrade Laravel application framework to 5.8 for EDUC project (Appreview, Student, Testscore, Budget) and NARF (Hiring database).

Cycle 103

Apr 29, 2019 – May 10, 2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Finalized delete time frame as 3 quarters after applicant’s target enrollment quarter. This provides overlap for applicants that re-apply in following year, PESB reporting, and is approximately 1 year after decisions communicated.
(Complete) Executed delete of historical application data through 2018 Summer.
(Complete) Added a delete information page. This shows the delete policy, some example programs with life cycle dates, and shows material that will be saved to the student record.
(Complete) Added a delete reminder message. This will be displayed on Applicant Review home page to users with “Settings” role when it is time to delete another quarter’s worth of applications.
(Complete) Added a specific slot where undergraduate change-of-major forms can be uploaded to application record. These uploaded files will be deleted along with application.

NARF Hiring

(Complete) Changed compensation details to a single field (previously there was one field for requester and a second field for HR, now HR will correct or supplement the requester input). FTE field is available to requester.
(Complete) Hiring requests can be searched by the PCA code entered on budgets.
(Complete) Courses can be displayed on the budget entry tool, this will help select the correct budgets.
(Complete) Added a request type “Compensation Change” this will allow these adjustments for current employees to utilize the same review and approval process as new appointment requests.
(Complete) The “Recent” section on the home page shows all requests that are not yet resolved (Complete or Canceled) plus any resolved requests that were requested in the last two weeks.
(Complete) The home page view of appointment request now shows the last action completed on a request (what happened, by whom, and when). When the current stage does not have single staff assignment (Department Approvals and Fiscal Approvals) the person who’s approval is requested is shown.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Add user id number to error reporting system. This helps better understand errors and allows for response to user where appropriate.

April 2019

Attended international DrupalCon in Seattle April 8-11

Built Leadership Programs landing page for main College site

Migrated CRIEI conference site from UNC server to our UW shared server (Drupal)

Built out new Teacher Appreciation page for College Advancement

Began planning new Professional Development section of COE site with Dustin Wunderlich

Cycle 102

4/15/2019 – 4/26/2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Delete Character & Fitness forms. These are forms formerly collected by the college, but now teacher candidates submit this form directly to the state.

Budgets

(75% Complete) Working on some updates to the Budget database for the fiscal office. There are currently in a dev environment and will be refined, approved and deployed to production as a packages.

Add field for Budget Purpose.
Add Reconciler staff assignment field.
Revise Budget permission and user tools to provide more incremental permission sets.
Add notes to budget detail page.
Can add People related to the budget with role description.
Show the budget update scope in the web interface. This shows the UW Org Codes used to find College of Education budgets.

Hiring

(Fixed) When a request is Sent-Back and then resubmitted it will return to the HR Approval stage and not progress until that HR Approval is provided.

Student

(Complete) Show rubrics in Student database, added section to Student detail page. These are preserved records from deleted applications.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Added a routine that deletes orphaned files, attachment files that exist in the file store but don’t have records in the application database.
(Complete) Improve employee name parsing. Employee preferred names are only available as “Last, First M” field. Fixed handling of situation where employee put a comma in their preferred last name.

Cycle 101

4/1/2019 – 4/12/2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

When an Application is deleted system checks if that Application was only reference to a Person record. If if was the only reference the Person record is deleted also. If it was not the only reference (person had other applications, is a student, is a college employee) the Person record is preserved.
Moved applicant contact information from Person record to Application record. This gives a clear relationship so contact information can be deleted with Application.
Moved self-reported test scores to the Application context. This clarifies the origin of these scores and allows the self-reported scores to be deleted with the Application.
Copy applicant email address to person record. We want to keep this for enrolled students after application is deleted.
Added contact information, self-report test scores, Grad School application web service cache to the Application delete routine.
Created a batch routine that deletes all applications in a given quarter.

Person

Create a person reference report that shows all references to a person record in the system grouped by the person’s role in that context (e.g. person is an Applicant, person is a Student, person is an User). This query is based on a “Person-Reference” configuration which provides concise listing and categorization of database relationships to the persons table.
Refactor the person merge system to use the “Person-Reference” configuration.
Added a person delete process that deletes a Person record and all of its child records. This process also uses the “Person-Reference” configuration.
Add foreign key constraints to database schema. Application deletes will impact person data and I want an extra level of validation that related records are considered and handled correctly.
Remove use of person id: 0 in logging fields to represent actions performed by the system.

Cycle 100

3/18/2019 – 3/29/2019

Work Complete

Work continues toward Deleting Application Data. This cycle I implemented some tools to help Institutional Research team code records for the application warehouse and did refactoring of the warehouse data model. We want the warehouse vetted and settled before we begin the historical delete process.

Applicant Review

(Complete) Forms for Institutional Research hand-coding. There are a few attributes we would like in the application warehouse that are not consistently represented in the application.
(Complete) Refactor previous UW enrollment fields to capture specific previous COE undergraduate majors. We want the data warehouse to let us look at how graduates feed into other programs.
(Complete) Refactor and rename simplified race/ethnicity fields. Frequently reporting requires us to report a single race/ethnicity value per application even though applicants are allowed to provide multiple. Different data audiences have different strategies to get to a single value. This change added multiple strategies to the data warehouse and made the field labeling more clear.
(Complete) Refactor EDW Ethnicity maintenance routine.
(Complete) Delete GRE fields from our local Application Data Warehouse. We have an established strategy for GRE reporting using UW institutional data.
(80% complete) Application delete routine that purges the graph of records related to a single application. This routine also handles the move of specified items to the student record for enrolled students. (Specific application documents and rubric scores.)