CEMS student portal

In order to enable first year students to make their selection of optional modules before they arrive, where this is required in their programme, we have committed to providing a site which will present a student-friendly view of the FOLD data, which generates an option form specific to the programme taken.

The site must contain appropriate student views of:

• programmes - overview, contacts, links to Cereus PDF programme spec [? but it is often very out date]
• programme structures
  
• modules (simplified and perhaps enhanced)
  
• teaching staff
  
• an option selection form for a specific stage of a programme
• The ILP option form
• specific guidance on dissertations (with a table of past dissertation titles and their supervisors)
  

In fact this turns out to be a rebirth of some aspects of the ill-fated logging-in project which was canned when the central Admit project was announced. Since all students will be made aware of this site in their welcome packs, it's an ideal place to put additional information and links.

Here are some of the ideas for this site:

• additional guidance to students on why they should or should not take an optional module - at programme and module level (gives module leaders somewhere to express informally what background is helpful and what careers it will help with)
• short biographies of staff to give the place a more personal feel
• staff research interests to assist students starting dissertations and projects
  
• the programme of study checker under development
  
• FAQs of significance to incoming students, including definitions of some of our terminology (What exactly is a pre-requisite - does it mean you have to have passed the module or merely taken it?)
• links to the most relevent parts of the CEMS external web and the UWE site
• a diary of key dates for the 2006/7 year (with iCalendar export)
  

Whilst the core functionality of supporting option choice is top priority, this site provide a great opportunity to add some 'cool' stuff. I have in mind:

• a blog - this blog on the development of the site itself might be interesting to the information systems and computing students, but it would be great to find a few staff - an admissions tutor, a student advisor, a first year tutor to share the writting of a blog. A shared blog would also be one way for students, via comments, to interact with staff.
• a podcast welcome talk from the dean
  
• maps. I've played around with CommunityWalks, Google Earth and made an 'Arts in Bristol' overlay, but Google coverage for the Frenchay site is poor. Just the other day, Microsoft's Live Local was launched and this is terrific. Here's a demonstration overlay for the Frenchay site. Not only is the aerial view better than Google's but we have these wonderful oblique bird's eye views from 4 directions. Editing an overlay is straightforward.
• Discussion board. Probably use the Student Union for this
  

Checking a programme of study

The prototype study programme checker is now available from the programme page. This checker allows a user to select the modules already taken, and the script will then check the pre-requisites, co-requisites, excluded combinations for each selected module, showing the remaining unsatisfied conditions (if any). It also checks on the credit limits for options and for the programme overall.

There are a few problems with the prototype:

• Multiple ILP modules on a programme (fixed with a fudge)
  
• Included Options
• Credit-based constraints on a module ( these need to be encoded in the module specitication but otherwise working)
  
• Programmes which are not 3/4 year (fixed)
  
• No distinction between modules taken and being taken ( and hence no difference between pre-requisites and co-requisites) - needs radio buttons in place of the checkbox
  

and some user interface issues:

• linking from constraints to the modules in the structure somehow (DHTML?)
  
• the color-coding and text
• clearing the selections
  

A future possibility would be to extract a student's record, to pre-select modules passed and to show the mark gained. This would include modules taken which are not on the programme being viewed, for students who have switched programmes.

If the user can entering expected marks, a grade prediction could be done.

This page could also act as the option collection form next year, or perhaps just use the new stage option form required for the student portal now.

A complication is that the rules which apply to both the programme and each module for a given student are not those in the current year, but are those which pertained at the time of the student's registration. Since all versions are in the database, this is possible, although our history is only back to 2005. Modules are fine since the mechanism is therre already, programmes a bit trickier since it's not clear how to determine which version applies to what. I wonder if such changes are always in the student's favour - i.e. could previous conditions be applicable which would now make a choice which is legal in the current programme/ module illegal ? Seems unlikely, so that the only cases where such history is relevant is where conditions were more relaxed in the past - so using the current situation only will err on the cautious side (for UWE).

I also wonder if the conditions and excluded cominations should be filtered for modules on the programme - its confusing to be alerted to exclusion of modules not on the programme, or to the possibility of satisfing a prerequisite with a module which is not on the programme - the ability to add or import modules taken from a previous programme would allow apparently unsatisfiable conditions to be met, but what then is the status of exclusions - presumably the problem is that credit cannot be gained from both, rather than that the student cannot take the module at all?

Events and Calendars

Thanks to Amit's work, FOLD can now generate iCalendar files for an event or a group of events. iCalendar is a format which is accepted by Microsoft Outlook and many other diary managers.

A single event can simply be added to Outlook by clicking on the link and confirm that you want the file opened in Outlook (if thats the default for text/calendar files on your computer). This opens up a window where you can save the vent.

For sets of events, you have to save the file and then open it up in Outlook to add all the events at once.

Faculty Forum

I had the opportunity to do a brief presentation at the end of Wednesday's faculty forum. A bit rushed at the end of a long session on strategy. Given slightly more time, I would have mentioned the great support for the project given by Andrea, Jon and Tracey.

Highlights: The generation of GoogleEarth overlays from data about students on programmes worked well. Generated some interest in the interface design.

Midlights: Questions asked about
data protection - the GE overlays revealed student names - I've since removed them
data integrity - a better answer would have been about the principle of allocating responsibility for data to those responsible for the task.

Lowlights: Didn't really get the timing right and forgot to check the display resolution of the projector the room - I guess thats a piece of data it would be handy to hold in a resources database.

Session Powerpoint slides

Where do the students come from?

Patrick has pulled postcode data from ISIS for all our students. I now have a script which selects the students on a specific programme and for each, finds the district part of the UK postcodes
looks it up in a table of postcodes latitudes and longitudes and generates a kml PlaceMark so the whole set can be viewed as a layer in GoogleEarth.

Not sure what to make of the results, except that our students come from all over Britain.

I think the resolution of the locations (there are around 3000 districts in the UK) should not be a enough to be a breach of privacy. At present, only a plain marker is displayed- in future you could imagine a link to that student's data.

Inspired by Chris McEvoy's Simply Google page, I've decided to bring more of the searches directly onto the home page - this means programmes, modules, module titles, staff, groups and roles should be directly searchable from this page - a simple change but I believe an effective one. But perhaps this makes the index page look rather daunting - over to the users - what do you thing about this interface?

I've also added shortcuts here - if there is only one match, that page will be displayed. If not, the search page with the list of alternatives is shown. Perhaps this too is a bit confusing?

Events

Events on FOLD have been improved somewhat. In addition to viewing the calendar of events, events can now be located by group and by person. The list of personal events includes the events of all groups of which the person is a member.

We have also extended the event handling so that exams and courework deadlines are now treated as events. They are now included in a person's list of events.

Further work is required to enhance the integration with Outlook. Currently only group events will generate a vcal entry to add to Outlook, but we intend to be able to add a whole set of events, including module-related events. We also plan to support icalendar, the later version of vcal as well. At present we cant seem to get the file generated correctly with XQuery and have to use a small PHP script. It is a challenge to use Xquery/XSLT for everything.

Exam timetable

The latest exam timetable has been incorporated into FOLD. So far this data appears in a couple of places:

• the module run screen
• the list of future events for a person

Full integration of exams , or more generally - Controlled Conditions elements - is proving tricky because:

• there is no agreed identifier of the individual elements elements
• elements are not one for one with examinations - multiple exams for a single element in the specification
  
• even if this relationship was cleaned up, there are cases of multiple exams for different groups of students - students on different awards
  

Basecamp

Over the past weeks, we have been experimenting with a web application for lightweight project management. The application is Basecamp, provided by 37Signals. Our project is here. Anyone who is playing an active part in the project can be a member.

Goings-on in CEMS Information Systems

Today we launch a new channel of communication about progress (and the inevitable setbacks) in the delivery of information systems within the CEMS faculty.