Month: November 2016

Nov 14, 2016 – Nov 23, 2016

This cycle we experimented with reviving the student record concept. In STEP this entity is the degree record. This data entity attempts to group a series of quarters for a single student into a collection of effort toward a degree (or certificate, etc). In our reporting and creation of other features we keep coming up with needs for data points like "when did the student enter this program", "what is a student's status".

The difference in our approach this time is that we want to make student "Record" user manageable. We will still have the logic we have defined for expected pathway transitions. But when our automated grouping doesn't represent an edge case the way we want, we will have GUI edit tools allowing admin staff to manually group quarters into a Record.

Right now student "Record" has been prototyped and is under consideration. We will be careful not to couple it to other features until we have decided on its utility.

Work Complete

STEP

• Updated placement reports for recent database changes.

Courses

• Fixed issue with missing joint course listing.
• Search tool handles empty search query.

Student 2

• Report of student to whom a specific milestone applies and their status (complete as of quarter / incomplete) for that milestone.
• User authorization view and user edit for Student 2.
• Upload an attachments to student file. Attachments can be deleted by the user who uploaded them and by system admins.
• Add a comment to student file. Comments can be edited and deleted by the user who added the comment and by system admins.
• Create a group. Add and remove students from specific groups.
• Created student record entity and populated from Major (by quarter) and Complete data.

Tech Support

• Removed department selector from client new ticket view.

Nov 28, 2016 – Dec 9, 2016

Continued working on Student 2 with a goal of fully transitioning and retiring STEP by early January 2017. Added a Tracked Issue feature which allows notes to be added to a student record and students with these notes to be highlighted in a Tracked Issue report. Additionally Tracked Issues are imported from applicant review (course work contingencies and application material contingencies) and generated automatically from low grades or low quarterly GPA.

Work Complete

Appreview

• Reformat user authorization screen with common role based permission on left and occasional add-on permissions on right.
• Added time submitted to application download CSV file to support application processing workflows.

Recruitment

• Work on RSVP form.

Student 2

• Added ECO to student data loaded from EDW and to program menu and report program filter.
• Changed default student report to Enrolled report. Report is filterable by program, degree and specific quarter (defaults to current quarter).
• Add cohort member count (number of students) to cohort index.
• Add CSS style to completed record (UW Gold with banner image) to make more visible.
• Student menu includes links to the last five student detail pages user viewed.
• Added student contact information to student detail. Daily job to query contact information from EDW. STEP Sync task that brings in job email and alumni email.
• Updated Program menu to display list of COE programs order by pathway and broken down by area. Program report shows students in program, default enrolled and inactive.
• Updated download CSV file to include contact information.
• Fixed doctoral committee import to store graduate school representative as GSR instead of Gsr.
• Implemented a strategy for updating from UW Student Web Service efficiently. Update runs nightly for last completed quarter, but only processes a quarter once and runs that single update 2 days after grades are due. Additionally only processes students who were enrolled last quarter.
• Tracked Issues entity built. Displays on student detail page in right side bar. Create, edit, resolve, delete forms. 
• Resolved tracked issues are hidden by default. Summary is displayed ("3 resolved issues") which can be clicked to display the resolved issues.
• Tracked Issues report shows list of students with tracked issue. Report show single row per student with most recent report, but row is expandable when students have more tracked issues.
• Application review contingencies (material incomplete, required course work not complete) are imported into the student system as tracked issues. Appreview contingencies are only imported when a student enrolls.
• Tracked Issues for low course grade and low quarterly GPA are automatically created when UW Student Web Service enrollment history is processed. Done inital adjustment of this routine to only create tracked issues for students who are not complete and only create tracked issues during quarters student is enrolled in a COE major.
• System generated Tracked Issues can be deleted by staff. Logging system has record that these items were already created once and will not regenerate them.

Tech Support

• Added attachments to tickets. Attachments can be added through web interface after ticket is created or can be attached to email sent to system help addresses. Attachments appear as messages on tickets.

Infrastructure

• Fixed login/logout page (seen during Appreview External User login process) did not have correct menu styling. Improved the menu building to accept literal href values, simplifying menu declaration per application context.
• Generalized the configuration loader used by Student Requirements feature to populate system lookup tables. This will support more general implementations of our applications (e.g. easy to share with other units) and allow us to consistently update lookup data in various environments.

Oct 17, 2016 – Nov 10, 2016

Our original vision for Credits and Milestone requirements was that they could be configured through a user accessible web UI. As we documented the complexity and inter-relatedness of these objects it became clear that a user GUI was a bad approach. Configuring the many requirements would have been time consuming and error prone.

Instead we decided to create a declarative configuration file which would provide an orderly overview of entire requirements set. This config file has a loader that reads it and generate the operation database records to run the system.

Having this config in a separate file allows us to manage it in version control and test configuration in developement and deploy those exact changes to production.

Work Complete

Appreview

• Resolved empty committee assignment bug.

Courses

• Added reason options and locking to course release.

STEP

• Revised doctoral committee loader for change in Grad School data file.

Student 2

• Fixed import STEP users.
• Provided a basic CSV download. This only includes student name and program at the moment, but will be built out in future work.
• Modified the data load from UW Enterprise Data Warehouse to use student preferred name when available.
• Catalog STEP milestone rules and behavior for implementation in Student 2. Build database schema that will store milestones.
• Built a "Requirements Graph" system that loads all of the credits requirements and milestones requirements relevant to a specific student and bind the conditional and dependency relationships between requirements.
• Requirements config loader system. Includes a sparse readable configuration file which contains settings for Student Sets (rules for selecting students by program and degree), Credits Requirements, and Milestone Requirements. A loader system takes this file and generates operational entities in the database. The requirements config file can be managed in version control and promoted from development to production environment.
• Requirements can be filled (marked complete) based on data found in UW transcript via UW Student Web Service.
• Existing milestone data has been imported from STEP. This is a re-runnable sync process which will be regularly run through launch of Student 2.
• Milestones can be filled by import of doctoral committee data from Grad School.
• Form for staff to manually mark a milestone complete.

Tech Support

• Add CQEL as department in ticket system with custom email ingestion.