News

Jul 5, 2016 – Jul 15, 2016

This cycle we continued work on Student 2. We did some requirements drafts and mock-ups on major features that will be enhanced in Student 2: Credit & GPA counts, Placements, and Milestones. In the next couple weeks we will be meeting with subject matter experts in the college to ensure the new build is a significant useful enhancement.

Work Complete

Appreview

• Validation on external user edit form to ensure that login string is unique.

Courses

• Refinement to view titles and menus to help clarify user navigation.
• Course load report has UI so associate deans can look at views per faculty.

Student 2

• Client side application to load current registration and transcript into student detail page.
• Display student picture on detail page. Implemented the UW ID Card photo web service.
• Show groups (including cohorts) on the student detail page.
• Reformatted student header block with photo, current program, advisor, and groups.
• Report of students by cohort. Cohort menu is a dynamic expandable tree.
• Report of students On Leave last quarter showing status this quarter. Graduate students previously On Leave must extend leave or register before end of current quarter or they lose status.
• Report of student inactive for over a year.
• Doc Committee displayed on student detail page.
• Requirements documents, implementation plan, mock-ups for Credit & GPA, Placements, and Milestones. Prep for meetings with SMEs.

Tech Support

• Created a detailed work plan for adding department to the tech support ticket system. This will allow Haring Center to use the tech support database for ticket and inventory tracking.

Test Scores

• Add a test score assessment type.

Infrastructure

• Upgraded EDUC project to Laravel 5.2. This version included binary file response used to add student Husky ID Card photos to Student 2.
• Amazon Web Service UW account set up. 
• Research and planning for Splunk implementation. Splunk is a log file analysis platform that will allow us to get actionable highlights and summaries from server and application data.

Jun 20, 2016 – Jul 1, 2016

Work Complete

Courses

• Brainstorming and planning around sharing Courses with other units. Several other units have expressed interest if having a tool for course scheduling like ours. We are exploring workable ways to support them. Initially we have set up a demo site for other UW users to explore.
• Authorization system for course release.

Person

• Modify the person update process (name changes, logging) to allow processes that preview changes without committing them.

Student 2

• Import Grad School Doctoral Committees data. Link to existing person data where possible for coherent searchable record but allow for external committee members. New system keeps historical committee data with effective end quarters. Ran updates for available import files (year's worth).
• Faculty list and faculty detail page. Faculty detail page includes advisees and committee roles.
• Advisor on student detail page.
• Scheduled jobs for updating Student 2 nightly on production.
• Connector to UW Student Web Service (SWS) to get student current registration and transcript data. System to lookup course titles from UW SWS and cache them locally to speed transcript load times.
• Stand alone page view of registration and transcript. Client side application will load these views into the student detail page on activation (same behavior as STEP).

Infrastructure

• Progress toward getting a UW account set up for Amazon Web Services. 
• Meetings with UW-IT and tech staff at Computer Science about strategies for security hardening web servers and applications.

6/6/2016 – 6/17/2016

Work Complete

Courses

• Course title change, research issue, communicate bug to UW SWS.
• Adjustments to My Courses and Faculty Activity reports.

Student

• Display "Summer Term" for status of students not enrolled in Summer but who were enrolled in Spring.
• "Program" filter on student report tool added.
• "Degree" filter on student report.
• Dynamic paging on student reports. Reports with under 500 records show entire report. Longer reports are automatically paged. Paging is added or removed as user interacts with filter system changing report length.
• Remove year and quarter filters from general student report. This is a report of "latest" status of a student, so picking a time period doesn't make sense. 
• Report of student "Completes". This report has year and quarter plus academic year. The year quarter filter can be applied to the report as "in the specified period" or "since the specified period".
• About page for Student 2.
• Sync faculty data from STEP to Student 2. Sync processes are designed so they can be run as needed throughout development and deployment, they updates existing records.
• Sync cohort data from STEP to Student 2. In student 2, implemented as Groups and Cohort rules, which provide configuration for automatically generating and populating groups that represent cohorts.
• Sync advisor data from STEP to Student 2. Advisors are now linked to student based on a "first quarter" and "last quarter" instead of linking to a program enrollment. Sync process generates first quarter & last quarter from STEP advisor start/end, completed quarter, and first enrolled quarter.

Tech Support

• Had meeting and established good requirements list to plan project.

May 9, 2016 – May 20, 2016

This cycle we keep moving forward on recent projects Test Scores new model, Student UW data model, new server infrastructure and faculty merit report.

Work Complete

Students

• Added IAL Coaching as pathway in STEP.
• Database and model build for new student data model.
• Continue work on process for loading student data from UW Enterprise Data Warehouse. Got load process rebuilt and functional, but need further work for eccentricities in UW "On Leave" data.

Test Scores

• Updated add score forms for new test score data model.
• View Test Score types and Assessment types in web interface. Edit Assessment types.
• Add CBEST test scores to configuration. Add form for CBEST.

Infrastructure

Plan for new COE public web site server and separate info system server. This will be built on new servers and existing web servers retired after completion.

Plan for in place transition from RHEL 6 to CentOS 6 for existing web servers by 7/30.

Work Planned

Courses

• Approvals for course releases

Test Scores

• Update add test score forms for new model
• Edit tools for test score types and assessments
• Too for add CBEST scores

Students

• Finalize name and update logic for Current / Latest records
• Automated import from EDW for current, complete, major-quarter
• Beginning of student view in new system
• Student search

Infrastructure

• Long term plan for server function and build for information systems and websites
• Create a build & migration plan including handling July 30 deadline for RHEL
• Context menu – migrate system to use educ version
• Convert UI of educ to bootstrap for better mobile (touch & small screen) support

April 11 – April 22

We are continuing work on the tool supporting faculty merit reporting and student data load. Initial implementation of student data load is complete and we are doing iterative comparisons of system loaded data to manually curated data to refine our load process.

The first ECFS application cycle using the Apply portal is finishing up this week. We have identified a short list of projects that will make Apply/Appreview more useful to ECFS.

We have a June deadline for operating system update on our web servers, work continues on the sandbox environment.

Work Complete

Apply/Appreview

• Email template editor has font and font-size picker. Uses line breaks instead of paragraph blocks.
• Material uploaded by applicant through Apply portal properly marked as applicant upload. Not deletable, but can be hidden.
• User view of Apply Cycle configurations (what applicants can apply for using Apply portal). Apply Cycle configuration allows application to be marked complete automatically on submit.
• Email workflow for sending email to applicants who have started an application in the Apply portal, but not submitted it.

Courses

• Daily update is modified to update previous quarter in addition to future quarters. This insures that when quarters end, local courses data is synced to actual in the UW Time Schedule.
• Migration script for faculty merit reporting that updates database for new entities.

MRBS

• MRBS Room schedule has preview image and links to the detailed about page in the COE Technology blog.

Student

• Nightly update runs that will change students with inactive statue to Registered or On Leave. Nightly update also adds new students. This nightly load will supplement the quarterly load which has significant manual adjustments to merge major changes over time.
• UW Quarters table in EDUC project (Person, Testscores, Appreview, new student) which updates on a schedule from UW student web service term resource.
• Adjusted Milestone update schedule to focus on currently enrolled students. Additionally any time a user views a student detail page in STEP that students credits and milestones get updated from the UW student web service.

 

Work Planned

Apply

• User view of Apply Cycle configuration viewable by any Appreview user
• Template and report to send email to applications started in Apply, but no submitted
• Apply Cycle configuration option for applications to automatically be marked complete
• Material submitted by student through Apply portal should not be deletable by staff

Course

• Faculty merit reporting

Students

• Existing STEP system is not updating credit and milestone data frequently enough
• Analyze differences between automated student data load and curated student data, revise load system 
• Update UW quarter data from web service
• Build a system to calculate the quarter a student was first enrolled and last enrolled with in a major/degree path

Test Scores

• All test score types should have a strategy for importing unknown PESB assessment codes
• Create notes on test score data model and load strategy based on six months worth of real world experience

Infrastructure

• Copy all web content from production server to sandbox
• Install and configure Shibboleth on sandbox 
• Review sandbox firewall rules for SSH login 

March 28 – April 8

This cycle we are working on a tool to help faculty complete their annual merit reports. This new report will pull data from various systems relevant to merit reports. A single view will list courses taught, course buy-outs, students advised, students completed, and grants with proposals and awards.

We are also working on an automated load of student data. Currently our student database is loaded quarterly from UW data. However the loaded data goes through a fair amount of manual adjusting. This limits our ability to load frequently and keep the data as fresh as we would like. We are working on building an application that can implement all of the manual corrections so that data can be refreshed on a regular basis. At the same time we are revising our local data structure so the system can provide more useful reporting for student services and advisors.

Work Complete

Apply

• Limit applicant uploads to PDF or Word files
• Helpful message for file too larger error
• Fix Enter Scores list in Appreview included un-submitted applications

Courses 

• Faculty Merit Report

Person 

• Edit person descriptor. Person descriptors briefly answer "who is this?" and guide system authorization decisions. When the system generated summary is not helpful a user can enter a manual descriptor. 
• Auth audit report

Student 

• Design and implement new student tables that support advanced reporting
• Load process for UW SDB (student data) into college database. Initial process, we will look at how this compares to the heavily managed data in STEP and continue to improve the loader.
• Debugging view to compare new student list to existing in STEP