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Office of Institutional Research

Month: October 2016

Cycle 44

Oct 3 – Oct 14, 2016

This cycle was mostly focused on Student 2 work. We also have work in progress for new RSVP functionality that will run in the Recruitment database. This will allow people to sign up for events directly in our CRM system and save us the effort of importing data from spreadsheets.

One of our big goals with Student 2 is to have fewer features hard coded in the application and more configurable through the web GUI. Credit counts and Milestones are the major initial features to be implemented this way. This is a challenging approach. The rules system is complex, it requires a user interface that is powerful and still understandable. Here are a few approaches I am using to help this work.

  • Good use of help information embedded in forms.
  • Display configuration formatted similarly to ultimate output. Credits configuration looks like credits bucket on the student page.
  • Reuse behavior so once a user understands how Set rules work, they will be able to apply that to Credits rules and Milestone rules.
  • Provide result views so users can debug their configuration. For Sets show the effective programs included. For credits we have a view of the transcript with applicable courses highlighted.

Work Complete

EDUC Project

  • The boundless W logo in the upper left corner links back to the home page for each application context. If your in Budgets the W goes to Budgets > Home, in Appreview it goes to Appreview > Home, etc.

Student 2

  • Student Sets including flexible rules system, an efficient data structure, GUI configuration tools, and preview mechanisms. Allow configured selection of students by Major, Pathway, and Degree.
  • Credits system allows configured rules to be applied to data from UW Student Web Service enrollment resource and credits in specific categories to be counted up.
  • View of student "transcript" (SWS enrollment) that highlights courses counted by a specific credits bucket.
  • Transcript fresh date so that web service is only loaded occasionally or whenever configuration changes.
  • Student header (husky card photo and H1 student name) link back to this student's detail page.

 

Cycle 43

Aug 15, 2016 – Sep 30, 2016

This is a catch up post. During this period we migrated our production server from the environment shared with the college's public website to a dedicated "Institutional Research" server. This involved moving the existing applications but also many changes to be compatible with an updated software stack. Details about the new server configuration are in the Sandbox Server post. 

School of Social Work has implemented Course planner based on our courses database. This cycle we provided a little help to get them over the finish line so the tool is operational.

ECFS has started its second application cycle using the Apply Portal and we make some updates to the system based on initial experience.

The college's new undergraduate major Education, Communities and Organizations (ECO) was approved and we have updated all of systems to include it. Major change was a new Apply Portal feature to support applications to ECO.

The new servers provided the impetus to build a long planned deploy system. This system deploys our applications to the server and runs routine configuration with a single command. This is an effort saver, but also provides more consistent, documented deployments.

We provided help to the web team in building out their new server and migrating the college's public website to the new server.

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Built program detection sub-system for application from MyGrad. We needed Appreview to support changes to applicant program in MyGrad that can change the program in Appreview and update review committees.
  • ECO Apply Portal built.
  • Apply Portal cycle created for ECFS 2017 Winter.
  • Links to other applications displayed in Appreview application detail.
  • View transcript option available in Appreview for students who checked "Current UW Student" in Apply Portal.

Courses

  • Work on tools to add course releases and approvals.
  • Updated for changes in Associate Deans.
  • Highlight curriculum filter in Add an Offering tool.
  • Fixes for database queries where data is too long for columns.
  • Created ROU edit tools.

Grants

  • Fixed data loads where data is too long for columns.

Recruitment

  • ECO added as prospective student interest option.
  • Fixed server environment detection and email configuration for new servers.

STEP

  • Refined and reactivated advisor import from Appreview to STEP. This was originally matching on student only. With newer programs we have more students continuing from one program to another and import was creating advisors in wrong place.
  • Fixed bug that was preventing application success & error dialogs from being displayed.

Student 2

  • UW transcript data available through Student 2. Like STEP this is broken down by current/registration and completed course enrollment history.
  • Edit advisor tools for initial advisor assignment (this can be done by AST) or advisor changes (must be approved and entered by OSS). View of all advisor history.
  • Display application material in Student 2. This is the beginnings of a fuller attachment system in Student 2. Initially we are providing access to the application material (eg. Resume, Statement of Purpose) the application uploaded with their application.
  • Implemented an initial access control list for Student 2. Created a migration tool that creates user roles in Student 2 based on users in STEP.

Tech Support

  • Ironed out some bad references from the Departments feature roll out.

Infrastructure

  • Implemented remote login system on sandbox server to support external developer.
  • Redirect system and down message to support server migration. 
  • Build new IR servers. Migrate college internal applications to new servers. 
  • Deploy utility built and deploy routines created for each application.
  • Built an authorization plug in for the college wiki and tech wiki that gets user authorization from the tech support database. General users of ticket system can access "coewiki" and tech staff in ticket system can access "techwiki".
  • Fixed coewiki & techwiki search not working on new servers.
  • Debugged and modified EDW connections for new servers. The ODBC connection is not a fully supported channel from Linux / PHP. The stack that provides ODBC connections on the new server had some unexpected behaviors that could not be resolved at the driver level. We had to modify our client code to avoid the issues.
  • Updated "EDUC" project to be the public default application (on the old server the college public website was the default route). This involved making the home page not protected by login and updating error pages to work without logged in users.
  • Email system needed additional adjustment for move from PubCookie authentication to Shibboleth.