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Office of Institutional Research

Month: June 2016

2016 Summer

Summer Quarter 2016 Information System development goals

  • Courses – faculty activity reporting and course release functionality
  • Share Courses – find and support ways for other UW units to use our course planning system
  • Student 2 – update of student database
  • Tech Support – modify ticket system to be used by Haring Center and other departments

Faculty Activity Reporting

We are continuing to solicit and refine the facutly activity data available through the Courses database as well as make neccessary workflow changes to the course release process.

Student 2

We are doing a refresh of the student database with a focus on keeping it continually updated and providing more actionable information. More information in the Student 2 article.

Share Courses

There is incresasing external department interest in the College's curriculum planning process and the Courses system. We presented a poster session at the UW Organizational Excellence Showcase and hosted a demonstration attended by over 50 people from 20+ departments and academic units. The Courses system is tightly coupled to College of Education programs and organizational structure and in order to gain UWIT support in making upgrades to the Time Schedule input system, we are considering approaches that can help other units leverage and support our efforts.

Departments in Tech

Haring Center will begin using the College's tech support ticket system this summer to track requests. We are updating the ticket system to create a department view that will filter information down for users in a specific department, but still provide access as needed to the broader system. Our immediate build is for the Haring Center, but we are structuring the work to expand the system for use by other centers or offices.

Student 2

This Summer we are working on an updated version of the college's student advising database STEP. Project name while in development is "Student 2". The major outcomes of this update are:

  1. Structure data like UW student data so that updates can run automatically and be scheduled nightly.
  2. Provide reports about student activity that highlight when students need attention.
  3. Integrate with Appreview and provide access to meaningful application material.
  4. Restructure student groups to allow student to be part of multiple cohorts and other groups.
  5. Provide access to test score data through Student 2. Use this better for teacher certification.
  6. Refine Milestone system to make it configurable for more progams.
  7. Refine Placement data to support state reporting requirements.
  8. Decouple system from old and unsupported code frameworks.
  9. Clean up system visually and make more mobile friendly.

Data Structure

In our existing system, STEP, we have tried to group student work over time into a single record of a program the student is in and degree being pursued. Conceptually this makes a lot of sense. However the UW student data doesn't group student work over time this way. The UW data tracks what a student's major and degree was in any given quarter.

When a student's major or degree changed we would manually update those records in STEP to keep the related quarters together. Sometimes this logic was routine other times it was unique to a student. When we update the student data each quarter, historical data is left as is and new data has to be massaged to fit the system. This takes some manual effort and prevents us from updating more frequently.

Instead of coding the years of manual massaging (we tried and realized it was a sisyphean task) we are adopting the UW student data model. We will be able to tell you the program a student is in now. If you need it, you will be able to see what a student's major and degree was quarter by quarter.

We think this will get us the answers we want in almost all cases. What is the student's current (or latest) major and degree?

But most importantly, by adopting this model we can automate the import of UW student data, update daily, and keep Student 2 fresh and accurate.

Cycle 37

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.