News

08/31/2015 — 09/11/2015

We merged cycles 17 & 18 into a super cycle. Paul had vacation so it was shortened. Additionally we were working on Test Score repository which ended up being a very fluid (figure out the requirements as we built it) kind of project. We have a the functional base of test score repository working that will support our reporting process for PESB (Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board).

Work Complete

Courses

• Report of all courses with any tags and a list of all the tags each course has

Students

• Fixed a problem with import of initial advisors from Applicant Review. Added this as an automated job.
• Corrected endorsement addition certificate type
• More readable view of doctoral supervisory committees. Separate view of reading committee.
• Added longitude and latitude to placement institutions in STEP to support visualizations of teacher placements in Tableau.

Recruitment

• Tool to import a spreadsheet of prospective students into recruitment database (eg. sign up sheets from events and info sessions, shared data from other organizations).

Test Scores

• Imported all available test score data including WEST-B, WEST-E, NES, ACTFL, Praxis, and edTPA from data files provided by testing agencies and ACT and SAT from UW test score data.
• Provide summary counts of test scores in system by type along with percentage that have been matched to college person records.
• Use SDB system key in test score import fields to match test scores to person records
• Search for test scores by person. Searches college person records (students & applicants) and also person information found in test score import files.
• Test score detail view
• Forms to add test scores to system. Forms for each test score type that provides custom fields appropriate to that test score.
• Created a user interface for defining certificate and endorsement requirement rules and defining evidence rules which specify the test scores that satisfy requirements.
• Provided SQL queries so evidence for PESB reporting can be extracted from database.

Infrastructure

• Migrated this blog from UW Blog Network to College of Education center/dept server

Work Planned

Test Scores

• Import all files in Google Drive sample files, review import code for ongoing usage
• Import SAT and ACT from UW data
• UI to create Requirements, Requirement Rules, and Evidence Rules

08/17/2015 — 08/28/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Page titles (in Appreview Plus and in Budgets and Person)
• Recently viewed in application menu
• Application deadlines
• Display application review committee. Tools to set recommendation and scholarship
• Tool to add a comment
• Faculty dashboard view – set up and first couple elements, more to come
• Academic Support Team tools for set final decision and set advisor
• Report system with parameters (Report object query the database for related data to display on web pages and have parameters that can be adjusted for context or by the user)

Courses

• Allow course numbers to be reused over time. Review system for any place where curriculum abbreviation and course number are assumed to identify a course and include effective year and quarter. Put in back-log for other work
• GUI to set the update through quarter, start UW Time Schedule update process, and provide info about who changed setting and if update is currently running.
• Further refinements to application configuration system that incorporates database settings

Grants

• Improve grant data import process to prioritize “Principal Investigator” over other grant roles.

Students

• Refine PESB placement editing tools for actual work flows. Decided to change this from a “defaults” tool to a bulk edit tool.
• Placement tool that creates or edits a placement record for each student in a cohort.

Test Scores

• Sync student data from STEP to Person database
• Modify update process to match existing test score records and not insert duplicates
• Build person matching routine that compares person data from import files to students and applicants in our system are relates test scores to the correct people
• Plan Requirement entities and rules for automatically applying Evidence to Requirements.

Work Planned

Appreview Plus

• Page titles
• Recently viewed in application menu
• Application deadlines
• Set recommendation and scholarship
• Faculty dashboard view
• Academic Support Team tools for set final decision and set advisor
• OSS workflow tools for needs decision and needs update in MyGrad

Courses

• Report of all courses with any tag and list of all tags those courses have
• Allow course numbers to be reused over time. Review system for any place where curriculum abbreviation and course number are assumed to identify a course and include effective year and quarter.
• GUI to set the update through quarter, start UW Time Schedule update process, and provide info about who changed setting and if update is currently running.
• Further refinements to application configuration system that incorporates database settings

Test Scores

• Sync student data from STEP to Person database
• Modify update process to match existing test score records and not insert duplicates
• Build person matching routine that compares person data from import files to students and applicants in our system are relates test scores to the correct people
• Plan Requirement entities and rules for automatically applying Evidence to Requirements.

08/03/2015 — 08/14/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Map out full transition from SOARS to Appreview Plus with timeline
• Show attachments and make them downloadable
• Add comments pane to application detail and add comment tool
• Tool to edit deadlines when rules based deadlines are wrong
• Fixed application degree dates display

Courses

• Change division configuration for new Associate Dean
• Fix parameter header for Courses by ROU report
• Remove reference to comments “under construction” in offering detail About tab

Grants

• Fixed proposal download did not include the same records as proposal HTML report

Students

• Automated update. SME readable documentation (flow chart?) shows where data comes from and how statuses are decided.
• Update pre 2014 Field Placement PESB data with required hours, weeks, and placement type information
• Fix PESB default table year-qtr sorting function
• Add link to edit placement institutions tool

Test Scores

• Build test score repository in database tables
• Build import process for existing test score spreadsheets

Work Planned

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Grants
• Students
• Test Scores

07/20/2015 — 07/31/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Complete automated update process
• Fix person import – names getting replaced with external reviewer names
• Promote to production – activate daily Grad School updates
• De-activate SOARS secondary update process for ap_* tables. Make appreview tables in EDUC database the authoritative tables
• Refine application detail view. Build a UI vocabulary for sections.

Courses

• Include all general education requirements
• Get Term data from UW Student Web Service
• Add details of repetition rules to download CSV file
• Fix offering headers on pages where header has gray background
• Tool to create more offerings based on repetition rules
• Fix ROU Undergraduate and Professional filters cross linked

Work Planned

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Students – planned work missed, moved to Cycle 15

07/06/2015 — 07/17/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Completed fully automated import of SOARS application data to the Appreview Plus system. Allows us to adjust and rebuild and prepares for smooth deployment when ready to go live.
• Email modules and message conversion utility. Breaks email messages and templates, stored in SOARS as messy string data into atomic parts to support more sophisticated handling.
• Reviewer committee system. Allows reuse of reviewer groups for multiple program/degrees.
• Grad School web service connection uses current implementation with better logging and error handling.
• Logging system through event architecture. Application model supportive of both MyGrad based applications and local applications.
• Search tool for applications. Searches on name, UW NetID, and year/quarter of application.
• Application detail page rough out. Display the data that was imported to the new system.
• Deployed to development server so SMEs can begin reviewing web views.

Courses

• Improved UW Time Schedule linking system by displaying full list of course matches. In the past hidden sections (canceled or linked to another UWTS section) caused mistakes during quarterly linking process.

Grants

• Simplified grant person list so same person is not listed multiple times.
• Add budget end date to detail view.
• Report of awards where original award end date does not match related budget end date. (On development, to be deployed with SME approval.)

Students

• Meet with SME for STEP open issues  and faculty needs.
• STEP student import, review of current process. Begin planning for automated student import process.
• Fix for import process where modern style email addresses (something@uw.edu) were missed.
• Refining the import of Doctoral Committee data from Grad School. Now running this on a weekly basis.

Work Planned

Work continues on Appreview Plus. We know from previous projects that significant changes to a database can’t be done gradually, experimentally, and implemented using documentation. Large database transformations need to be automated so they can be triggered with a single command. We need to be able to build and test in one environment and when we are ready deploy in production. The build process needs to be run multiple times, reset, and retested so we know it works. Last cycle we built the transition infrastructure and completed coding for about 1/3 of the tables. Rest will be completed this cycle.

We got an exciting win under our belt by implementing an automated update for Grants data. Next we want to update student data automatically and nightly. This is a more complex update process, and we want it modular and configurable, so this cycle will be focused on requirements gathering, analysis of current manual process, and design.

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Grants
• Students