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Office of Institutional Research

Month: December 2015

Fall Quarter – Cycle 25

12/21/2015 – 01/01/2016

After all of this you might think Appreview is done. We can always find ways to make it better! This cycle (minus a couple days for the holidays) will include a few more touch-ups on Appreview before we fully leap into Undergraduate Applications in Appreview. Additionally we are making some important revisions to Courses to get you all the data you need and encourage everyone to keep Courses the up-to-date system of record.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Moved Appreview update to new (Version 3) Grad School application web service.
  • Graduate Non-Matriculated (GNM), by default, are filtered out of application reports following the program configuration (this program reviews GNM or does not). There is a new GNM filter in the report pickers which allows users to include or exclude GNM applications.
  • Withdrawn applications are, by default, filtered out of application reports. There is a new Withdrawn filter in the report pickers which allows users to include or exclude withdrawn applications.
  • Identified and refined tools to monitor applications that are referred to other programs. Got ok for this approach from Office of Student Services and Academic Support Team.

Courses

  • Course number reuse over time. Did some work on this, but discovered disconnect in UW data. UW overly separates courses (every time a course property changes UW treats it as a new course) which would break Course Planner database ability to group comparable courses. 

Work Planned

Appreview

  • Migrate to new Grad School Web Service. We currently depend on a deprecated version of the Grad School applicant web service. We need to migrate our application to their new version before the old one is shut off and to open the possiblity of bug fixes and enhnancements.
  • Graduate Non-Matriculated (GNM) report filter, allow users to choose to show or hide GNM applications.
  • Withdrawn application report filter, hide withdrawn applications by default, but provide report filter to optionally include.
  • Referral tools, provide reports, fields, and possibly notifications to support tracking of applications referred to another program.

Courses

  • Allow course numbers to be reused for different course titles/curriculum over time
  • Add data to CSV export including all teaching staff (multiple instructors, TAs, graders) and assigned rooms
  • Include canceled reason in the offering comments tab
  • Add "Meets During Finals Week" to room preferences. Knowing this may make more (bettter?) rooms available to COE faculty.
  • Allow OSS to configure when room scheduled is settled and should be included in Courses database.

 

 

Fall Quarter – Cycle 23 & 24

Cycle 23: 11/23/2015 – 12/04/2015
Cycle 24: 12/07/2015 – 12/18/2015

This is a consolidated work review for Cycle 23 and 24. It has been "heads-down, power through it" time and the blog update got back burnered.

We have had a very busy couple weeks getting Appreview Plus launched and the rough spots ironed out. SOARS is officially and fully retired so from this point forward "Appreview Plus" will just be Appreview.

School Psychology and TEP Elementary were the programs actively reviewing during the transition so thank you to Paula, Janine, Patrick, Jonathan and the other active users for excellent feedback and paitence while we got things settled.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Launched Appreview (Plus) on December 1, 2015.
  • CSV spreadsheet download of application report views
  • Added contact phone numbers and address to CSV spreadsheet download
  • Final decision displayed on application detail view as a "Workflow Bar" which includes: application complete/incomplete message, final decision entered, advisor assigned, and applicant intent.
  • Application header blurb (top of application detail page) links back to the application detail page
  • Areas of interest added to Application header blurb 
  • Users can add themselves to a review committee with a button click
  • Adjust reviewer dashboard to highlight important information and clickable report sections
  • Text file application items are displayed in a web page pop-up window instead of being downloaded to view on user's text application
  • Users can edit their own comments
  • Enter scores report says when an application can no longer be scored
  • Can create new Rubric scopes (these map rubrics to applications)
  • Changed report default period to "Current Applications". Current is defined as applications to begin in a future quarter.
  • Report state is preserved when browser back button is used. Added a link button that will show a URL to the current report state so reports can be shared among users via email, etc.
  • Mark a Rubric Score with "Definitely Interview" flag
  • Definitely interview flag is visible on score report and desiscion report
  • Join a review committee and enter a recommendation from the Rubric Score tool
  • Super users can delete Rubric Scores that were created in error
  • Various Rubric bugs (scorer name stored, total caclulated on complete, cells properly highlighting in edit tool)
  • Improved OSS degree evaluation tool to make faster during bulk data entry
  • Applications awaiting decisions report
  • OSS ability to see application materials the way they are presented to reviewers
  • Attachments uploaded by COE staff can be deleted
  • Degree institution uses MyGrad "Other" for institution name if available
  • Resolve issues with emails not always getting recorded in log
  • Handler for email batches where template fields don't have replacement values
  • Email batch view shows which emails are pending, sent, or failed
  • Add review template, then review each email workflow
  • Improvement and fixes to OSS Send Email Tool: selector has option to show already sent in report pickers, Javascript helper to Select All on send email view, Added Email [[TEMPLATE_FIELDS]] help message to views where templates are edited, batch reporting has better details, including time batch was started
  • Revise Appreview Plus initial load strategy to only pull purely local data from SOARS, use Grad School web service XML for all other fields
  • Multiple revisions to the update Appreview from Grad School strategy to properly detect changes in fields including OSS entry and recommendations that do change the application last changed date. Update process became massive and took to long to do regularly, implemented a "quick" and "full" update to run on different schedules. Update triggering bug in PDO/database interaction, made adjustments to code and database configuration to alleviate. Fixed bug corrupting person record that corresponded to update id.
  • Update from Grad School information available on Appreview About page
  • Added secondary update, query UW data warehouse to ensure we get UW system key (student identifier) ASAP
  • Automated merge process for duplicate Person records. New applications create extra Person record because they have no identifying fields until 48 hours after they submit application.
  • Remove various testing and development default values
  • Fixed application material not respecting show/hide configuration
  • Fixed allow download of material items that don't have filenames in MyGrad
  • Transcripts and Recommendations that are uploaded to "Other" category (instead of to specific degree or or recommender) are now accessible
  • Fixed "Calendar Year" option in report picker Period was not staying highlighted

Courses 

  • Add EDUCM for new Education Methods curriculum abbreviation
  • Faculty activity report include independent study credits

Students

  • Non-UW members of Doctoral Committees now available from Grad School and displayed in STEP

Test Scores

  • Imported recent test score data feeds for WEST-B, WEST-E, NES, Praxis. These scores are visible in appreview.

Multiple Systems

  • Scrub UW NetID input: when user enters myuwnetid@uw.edu in a form expecting a UW NetID the @uw.edu part is automatically stripped off.

New and Improved Applicant Review!

The College's new and improved Applicant Review is now online at:

https://education.uw.edu/a/appreview/

We've worked hard to design an interface that's similar to the other College information systems and easily navigated. A couple things to note:

  • Historical admissions data starting with Autumn 2014 and moving forward will be accessible
  • You can filter down to a set of applications by year, term, program, degree, decision, and advisor similar to how you use the filters in the Courses database
  • Check out the "My Applicants" link: https://education.uw.edu/a/appreview/my-applications for a view of your applications

Stay tuned for up coming brief demonstrations and training videos we'll post on the Canvas Information System Training Site: https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/864904

Next up? We are working with the CoE Undergraduate team to add undergraduate program application data to the system. We're planning to have this addition in place by March!