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Cycle 48

Dec 12, 2016 – Jan 6, 2017

We doubled up the development cycle for the holiday shortened weeks at the end of the year. This cycle saw some fixes to Courses, Tech Support, Test Scores and more work on the Recruitment RSVP tool. We continued to forge ahead with Student 2, focus on Placement data, still planning to officially launch and retire STEP middle of this month.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Add student intent fields to spreadsheet export file.

Courses

  • Returned the edit person link for AST to allow update of faculty sequence numbers.

Recruitment

  • More work on the RSVP feature, still in testing. Work with Google Map integration. More work on event RSVP metrics. Different fields for online and physical events.

Student 2

  • Added future quarter to nightly population updates from EDW. Our student queries are based on COE majors. When students register for courses in future quarters the registration record appears, but the student's major for that quarter is not filled in until near start of quarter. Added a process that uses last quarter's majors and next quarter's registrations to capture most upcoming registrations.
  • Added student class level to system. This is displayed alongside BA degrees and available in downloaded reports.
  • Resolved issues with cleaning out deleted data during EDW import.
  • Provided link to application in Appreview (when that record exists) in Student… menu on student detail page.
  • Provided link to (experimental feature) Record. Student Record attempts to group quarters together relevant to specific degree or certificate.
  • Moved quarter logic to a shared component. Updated most references to redundant code.
  • Created database and system entities for placements including Placement, Placement Types, Instituion, and Mentors.
  • Placement configuration tools, including optional fields, and delete handling (provides options to delete related placements or convert them to another placement type).
  • Created a STEP sync task that imports existing placement data into Student 2. Repeatable during transition process.
  • Placement display on student detail. Placement views use placement type configuration to display appropriate time periods and optional fields.
  • Report of Placements at a specific Institution.
  • Report of Placements in a specific School District.
  • Create, edit, delete Institutions.
  • Create, edit, delete School Districts.
  • Placement edit form. Multi-step form that changes inputs based on Placement Type configuration (time period, optional fields, PESB fields). PESB fields are prefilled with PESB defaults and displayed in a separate block for user input clarity. Ability to add new Institution or new Mentor record and return to Placement form in state you left it.
  • New Mentor addition tools to simplify data entry. Users are automatically prompted with Mentors that current student has on other Placements and other Mentors at the selected institution.
  • PESB default values by Placement type with tools to globally apply these defaults.
  • Google map pane on Institution view.
  • Report of Placements for students in a Cohort. User selects Cohort and quarter of placement.

Tech Support

  • Moved tech support email footer configuration to the department level. Each department can configure their own footer.
  • Fixed "missing person" message when displaying new tickets not yet assigned to any tech.
  • Updated user edit tool to accept UW NetID as unique identifier. This deep linking from our multi system user management tool.

Test Scores

  • Fixed an error where system would redirect to a non existent view after adding a WEST-B score with no reading component.
  • Display recently added scores on test score home page. This will display scores added in the last 60 days and if the scores were successfully linked. This should help staff interested in test scores understand state of data.
  • Added user management to test scores. Added viewer & admin roles allowing users to be given permissions simply to view test scores vs being able to add, link, and delete them.

Infrastructure

  • Updated to latest "Typeahead" input. This input accepts typed user input and provides suggested matches. We use this in several places for selecting Person records, but also for student groups and now for Placement Mentors. New version bulk downloads inital suggestion list and caches suggest list for better performance and also throttles subsequent update requests, preventing occasional server errors.
  • Refinements to access management. Less reliant on testing permissions based on URL pattern and transitioning to checking gates in relevant controller methods. This approach is more transparent about checks that are happening and less prone to authorization holes when routing changes.

Cycle 46

Nov 14, 2016 – Nov 23, 2016

This cycle we experimented with reviving the student record concept. In STEP this entity is the degree record. This data entity attempts to group a series of quarters for a single student into a collection of effort toward a degree (or certificate, etc). In our reporting and creation of other features we keep coming up with needs for data points like "when did the student enter this program", "what is a student's status".

The difference in our approach this time is that we want to make student "Record" user manageable. We will still have the logic we have defined for expected pathway transitions. But when our automated grouping doesn't represent an edge case the way we want, we will have GUI edit tools allowing admin staff to manually group quarters into a Record.

Right now student "Record" has been prototyped and is under consideration. We will be careful not to couple it to other features until we have decided on its utility.

Work Complete

STEP

  • Updated placement reports for recent database changes.

Courses

  • Fixed issue with missing joint course listing.
  • Search tool handles empty search query.

Student 2

  • Report of student to whom a specific milestone applies and their status (complete as of quarter / incomplete) for that milestone.
  • User authorization view and user edit for Student 2.
  • Upload an attachments to student file. Attachments can be deleted by the user who uploaded them and by system admins.
  • Add a comment to student file. Comments can be edited and deleted by the user who added the comment and by system admins.
  • Create a group. Add and remove students from specific groups.
  • Created student record entity and populated from Major (by quarter) and Complete data.

Tech Support

  • Removed department selector from client new ticket view.

Cycle 47

Nov 28, 2016 – Dec 9, 2016

Continued working on Student 2 with a goal of fully transitioning and retiring STEP by early January 2017. Added a Tracked Issue feature which allows notes to be added to a student record and students with these notes to be highlighted in a Tracked Issue report. Additionally Tracked Issues are imported from applicant review (course work contingencies and application material contingencies) and generated automatically from low grades or low quarterly GPA.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Reformat user authorization screen with common role based permission on left and occasional add-on permissions on right.
  • Added time submitted to application download CSV file to support application processing workflows.

Recruitment

  • Work on RSVP form.

Student 2

  • Added ECO to student data loaded from EDW and to program menu and report program filter.
  • Changed default student report to Enrolled report. Report is filterable by program, degree and specific quarter (defaults to current quarter).
  • Add cohort member count (number of students) to cohort index.
  • Add CSS style to completed record (UW Gold with banner image) to make more visible.
  • Student menu includes links to the last five student detail pages user viewed.
  • Added student contact information to student detail. Daily job to query contact information from EDW. STEP Sync task that brings in job email and alumni email.
  • Updated Program menu to display list of COE programs order by pathway and broken down by area. Program report shows students in program, default enrolled and inactive.
  • Updated download CSV file to include contact information.
  • Fixed doctoral committee import to store graduate school representative as GSR instead of Gsr.
  • Implemented a strategy for updating from UW Student Web Service efficiently. Update runs nightly for last completed quarter, but only processes a quarter once and runs that single update 2 days after grades are due. Additionally only processes students who were enrolled last quarter.
  • Tracked Issues entity built. Displays on student detail page in right side bar. Create, edit, resolve, delete forms. 
  • Resolved tracked issues are hidden by default. Summary is displayed ("3 resolved issues") which can be clicked to display the resolved issues.
  • Tracked Issues report shows list of students with tracked issue. Report show single row per student with most recent report, but row is expandable when students have more tracked issues.
  • Application review contingencies (material incomplete, required course work not complete) are imported into the student system as tracked issues. Appreview contingencies are only imported when a student enrolls.
  • Tracked Issues for low course grade and low quarterly GPA are automatically created when UW Student Web Service enrollment history is processed. Done inital adjustment of this routine to only create tracked issues for students who are not complete and only create tracked issues during quarters student is enrolled in a COE major.
  • System generated Tracked Issues can be deleted by staff. Logging system has record that these items were already created once and will not regenerate them.

Tech Support

  • Added attachments to tickets. Attachments can be added through web interface after ticket is created or can be attached to email sent to system help addresses. Attachments appear as messages on tickets.

Infrastructure

  • Fixed login/logout page (seen during Appreview External User login process) did not have correct menu styling. Improved the menu building to accept literal href values, simplifying menu declaration per application context.
  • Generalized the configuration loader used by Student Requirements feature to populate system lookup tables. This will support more general implementations of our applications (e.g. easy to share with other units) and allow us to consistently update lookup data in various environments.

Cycle 45

Oct 17, 2016 – Nov 10, 2016

Our original vision for Credits and Milestone requirements was that they could be configured through a user accessible web UI. As we documented the complexity and inter-relatedness of these objects it became clear that a user GUI was a bad approach. Configuring the many requirements would have been time consuming and error prone.

Instead we decided to create a declarative configuration file which would provide an orderly overview of entire requirements set. This config file has a loader that reads it and generate the operation database records to run the system.

Having this config in a separate file allows us to manage it in version control and test configuration in developement and deploy those exact changes to production.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Resolved empty committee assignment bug.

Courses

  • Added reason options and locking to course release.

STEP

  • Revised doctoral committee loader for change in Grad School data file.

Student 2

  • Fixed import STEP users.
  • Provided a basic CSV download. This only includes student name and program at the moment, but will be built out in future work.
  • Modified the data load from UW Enterprise Data Warehouse to use student preferred name when available.
  • Catalog STEP milestone rules and behavior for implementation in Student 2. Build database schema that will store milestones.
  • Built a "Requirements Graph" system that loads all of the credits requirements and milestones requirements relevant to a specific student and bind the conditional and dependency relationships between requirements.
  • Requirements config loader system. Includes a sparse readable configuration file which contains settings for Student Sets (rules for selecting students by program and degree), Credits Requirements, and Milestone Requirements. A loader system takes this file and generates operational entities in the database. The requirements config file can be managed in version control and promoted from development to production environment.
  • Requirements can be filled (marked complete) based on data found in UW transcript via UW Student Web Service.
  • Existing milestone data has been imported from STEP. This is a re-runnable sync process which will be regularly run through launch of Student 2.
  • Milestones can be filled by import of doctoral committee data from Grad School.
  • Form for staff to manually mark a milestone complete.

Tech Support

  • Add CQEL as department in ticket system with custom email ingestion.

Cycle 44

Oct 3 – Oct 14, 2016

This cycle was mostly focused on Student 2 work. We also have work in progress for new RSVP functionality that will run in the Recruitment database. This will allow people to sign up for events directly in our CRM system and save us the effort of importing data from spreadsheets.

One of our big goals with Student 2 is to have fewer features hard coded in the application and more configurable through the web GUI. Credit counts and Milestones are the major initial features to be implemented this way. This is a challenging approach. The rules system is complex, it requires a user interface that is powerful and still understandable. Here are a few approaches I am using to help this work.

  • Good use of help information embedded in forms.
  • Display configuration formatted similarly to ultimate output. Credits configuration looks like credits bucket on the student page.
  • Reuse behavior so once a user understands how Set rules work, they will be able to apply that to Credits rules and Milestone rules.
  • Provide result views so users can debug their configuration. For Sets show the effective programs included. For credits we have a view of the transcript with applicable courses highlighted.

Work Complete

EDUC Project

  • The boundless W logo in the upper left corner links back to the home page for each application context. If your in Budgets the W goes to Budgets > Home, in Appreview it goes to Appreview > Home, etc.

Student 2

  • Student Sets including flexible rules system, an efficient data structure, GUI configuration tools, and preview mechanisms. Allow configured selection of students by Major, Pathway, and Degree.
  • Credits system allows configured rules to be applied to data from UW Student Web Service enrollment resource and credits in specific categories to be counted up.
  • View of student "transcript" (SWS enrollment) that highlights courses counted by a specific credits bucket.
  • Transcript fresh date so that web service is only loaded occasionally or whenever configuration changes.
  • Student header (husky card photo and H1 student name) link back to this student's detail page.

 

Cycle 43

Aug 15, 2016 – Sep 30, 2016

This is a catch up post. During this period we migrated our production server from the environment shared with the college's public website to a dedicated "Institutional Research" server. This involved moving the existing applications but also many changes to be compatible with an updated software stack. Details about the new server configuration are in the Sandbox Server post. 

School of Social Work has implemented Course planner based on our courses database. This cycle we provided a little help to get them over the finish line so the tool is operational.

ECFS has started its second application cycle using the Apply Portal and we make some updates to the system based on initial experience.

The college's new undergraduate major Education, Communities and Organizations (ECO) was approved and we have updated all of systems to include it. Major change was a new Apply Portal feature to support applications to ECO.

The new servers provided the impetus to build a long planned deploy system. This system deploys our applications to the server and runs routine configuration with a single command. This is an effort saver, but also provides more consistent, documented deployments.

We provided help to the web team in building out their new server and migrating the college's public website to the new server.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Built program detection sub-system for application from MyGrad. We needed Appreview to support changes to applicant program in MyGrad that can change the program in Appreview and update review committees.
  • ECO Apply Portal built.
  • Apply Portal cycle created for ECFS 2017 Winter.
  • Links to other applications displayed in Appreview application detail.
  • View transcript option available in Appreview for students who checked "Current UW Student" in Apply Portal.

Courses

  • Work on tools to add course releases and approvals.
  • Updated for changes in Associate Deans.
  • Highlight curriculum filter in Add an Offering tool.
  • Fixes for database queries where data is too long for columns.
  • Created ROU edit tools.

Grants

  • Fixed data loads where data is too long for columns.

Recruitment

  • ECO added as prospective student interest option.
  • Fixed server environment detection and email configuration for new servers.

STEP

  • Refined and reactivated advisor import from Appreview to STEP. This was originally matching on student only. With newer programs we have more students continuing from one program to another and import was creating advisors in wrong place.
  • Fixed bug that was preventing application success & error dialogs from being displayed.

Student 2

  • UW transcript data available through Student 2. Like STEP this is broken down by current/registration and completed course enrollment history.
  • Edit advisor tools for initial advisor assignment (this can be done by AST) or advisor changes (must be approved and entered by OSS). View of all advisor history.
  • Display application material in Student 2. This is the beginnings of a fuller attachment system in Student 2. Initially we are providing access to the application material (eg. Resume, Statement of Purpose) the application uploaded with their application.
  • Implemented an initial access control list for Student 2. Created a migration tool that creates user roles in Student 2 based on users in STEP.

Tech Support

  • Ironed out some bad references from the Departments feature roll out.

Infrastructure

  • Implemented remote login system on sandbox server to support external developer.
  • Redirect system and down message to support server migration. 
  • Build new IR servers. Migrate college internal applications to new servers. 
  • Deploy utility built and deploy routines created for each application.
  • Built an authorization plug in for the college wiki and tech wiki that gets user authorization from the tech support database. General users of ticket system can access "coewiki" and tech staff in ticket system can access "techwiki".
  • Fixed coewiki & techwiki search not working on new servers.
  • Debugged and modified EDW connections for new servers. The ODBC connection is not a fully supported channel from Linux / PHP. The stack that provides ODBC connections on the new server had some unexpected behaviors that could not be resolved at the driver level. We had to modify our client code to avoid the issues.
  • Updated "EDUC" project to be the public default application (on the old server the college public website was the default route). This involved making the home page not protected by login and updating error pages to work without logged in users.
  • Email system needed additional adjustment for move from PubCookie authentication to Shibboleth.

Introducing Poll Everywhere, a New Audience Response Option at the UW

I wanted to relay some exciting news from UW-IT about a University wide license for Poll Everywhere.  Poll Everywhere is student/audience response system that does not require dedicated hardware or students to pay fees related to the service.  Respondents answer questions in real time using mobile phones, Twitter, or web browsers. Instructors can share responses live.

Here is a link to learn more: https://www.polleverywhere.com/how-it-works

If you are new to Poll Everywhere or want to learn a few new tips, we will host several lunch training sessions on Poll Everywhere this fall.

Details about the agreement and timeline below:

Survey data from UW students, backed by a resolution from ASUW, indicates that students strongly prefer using personal mobile devices or laptops rather than clickers for in-class audience response activities. To meet this need, UW-IT partnered with UW faculty and technologists to evaluate several options and selected Poll Everywhere for a pilot.  After a successful pilot and in consultation with the Faculty Council on Teaching and Learning and the UW-IT’s Provost-chartered Teaching and Learning Technology Oversight Committee, UW-IT will offer Poll Everywhere to UW faculty and students.

Poll Everywhere will be available in early September, at no cost, and faculty will be able to use the audience response software for autumn quarter classes. The initial rollout will not include integration with the Canvas learning management system, but integration will be in place for winter quarter.

UW-IT will continue to provide support for TurningPoint clickers for faculty who choose to utilize that service. Please be sure to investigate changes to the TurningPoint offering and the requirement that faculty use the new TurningPoint Cloud software this autumn. A significant change to the TurningPoint model is the need for students to purchase an additional license to use the service, whether faculty choose to use physical devices or allow smartphone or web-based access.
If you have any questions, please email help@uw.edu with “Poll Everywhere” in the subject line.

Cycle 41

Aug 1 – Aug 12, 2016

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Can now add users that don't have a person record in the system.

Courses

  • Fixes in Uwnetid scrubber
  • Form defaults for course releases to speed data entry.

Student (STEP)

  • Report that lists edTPA scores for all students in a TEP cohort.

Student 2

  • Requirements gathering, meetings with SMEs including ECFS, TEP, OSS. Work out plan for Credit Counts, Milestones, and Placements.

Tech Support

  • Add departments to ticket system to allow Haring Center support requests to be tracked in same system.
  • Update email ingestion to allow email to eeutech@uw.edu to go to ticket system and to automatically be assigned Haring Center department.

Infrastructure

  • Build new web servers for Institutional Research. Install infrastructure software, applications and databases.
  • Move EDUC project to default application. Configure new server for UW authenticated portal and anonymous portal.
  • Redirect application that will display "Down" message during migration and then redirect to new server after.
  • Refine Shibboleth configuration and install notes. Shibboleth was having trouble redirecting back to the server after login in some cases.
  • Deploy scripts that sync bigweb to the new IRPROD server to make migration day fast and accurate.

 

Cycle 40

7/18/2016 – 7/29/2016

Work Complete

We were able to dig into our UW institutional Amazon Web Services (AWS) account this cycle. AWS offers basic machine virtualization (EC2), but its more exciting features are the specialized services: object storage (S3), container hosting, specialized database services, etc. To make good use of AWS application should be architected to use services that support its components.

Our immediate need is development and staging environments for our production web server. Staging especially needs to be a close functional replacement for production. Getting AWS to closely emulate our UW production server means additional time and expense.

AWS is competitively priced, but it is not cheap. Our largely idle EC2 instance used for early testing was ringing up about $1.25 a day. Comparing that to UW-IT lowered rate on Hosted Virtual Machines and we are not saving much with AWS.

So seeing extra administrative effort, poor replication of production environment, and comparable costs we have decided to put our staging environment on a UW-IT Hosted VM. This process will also move internal facing Institutional Research information systems to a separate server from the public facing college websites.

Appreview

  • Validate that rubric scope is unique and provide helpful form error. Rubric scope maps specific rubrics to applicants to specific programs and years.

Student 2

  • Settings tools to configure faculty.