Category: Work Reviews

3/12/2018 – 3/23/2018

Work Complete

Courses

• Completed conversion of most UI from Prototype JS to jQuery. 
• Refine the person merge tool so it correctly show the results of the last merge without a page refresh.
• Fixed new instructor summary "John Smith +2" was not displaying in Plan a Quarter tool.
• Database schema updates to support better hiring tracking.
• Add/edit staff form prompts for employee type when entering instructor. Extra value to help with HRP forms.
• Users can enter expected hours when adding Reader/Grader instructional staff record. This optional field is meant to help with staff planning and potentially serve as a check during timesheet approvals.
• Courses configuration "Voting Faculty" now shows NetID, Area, Area Chair and can be downloaded as spreadsheet. This list is updated nightly based on current academic appointment data. 

Hiring 

The hiring database is in early development with HR and Fiscal team.

• Added tools to hiring database to work with UW academic quarters.
• Records that show which user completed an action store actual user data (previously stub data).
• Appointment request shows when there is an overlapping request for the same person and same quarter from a different request (two forms trying to hire same person for same period).
• Appointment request shows indicator for periods that are following hours and pay fields. Editing hours and pay on one of these linked periods updates the values for all.
• Notes can be added (edited, deleted) to an appointment request.
• User management tools. Can add new users searching college person data, assign hiring database roles.
• Beginnings of Approvals workflow. Users can add an Approval or request an Approval to be responded to by another user.
• Implemented person type-ahead input. Text field where user can enter a COE person's name or NetID and be presented with a matching suggestion list as they type.

Merit Reporting

• Prepare Merit Data report (currently accessible from Courses database) for 2018 faculty merit review cycle.
• View Other tool is now accessible to Area Chairs and college support staff. This will help faculty get support when using the data tool.
• Merit Data Report has more background information and instructions describing the report visible directly on the page.
• Merit Data Report has print style applied. When faculty print (hard copy or print to PDF) their report instructions and Courses navigation are hidden.

Infrastructure

• Adjusted html form library to be more flexible when extracting data.

2/26/2018 – 3/9/2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• Student number is displayed on student detail under the applicants name when student has a UW Student Number. This was required for ECFS processing, but decided to be useful for all applications.

Courses

• Work continuing on replaceing deprecated JavaScript library.
• Research and fix duplicate curriculum buttons in test environment.

Hiring 

This system is still pre-release. Initial work is being done with HR/P and Fiscal team.

• Implement payroll quarters. UW has fixed recurring payroll periods that correlate with academic quarters. Created a single configuration and date resolution strategy in hiring database that is used throughout that system.
• Implemented summer terms (A, B, Full, Staff) for courses and appointment periods.
• Quick add for academic year. When adding an Autumn appointment request provide checkboxes that say "Continues in Winter", "Continues in Spring".
• Delete an appointment period from a request.
• Appointment request workflow based on courses. If user enters courses first, appointment periods are generated automatically.
• When multiple appointment periods (quarters) are added to an appointment request the hours and pay fields are considered linked by default. Editing any period hours and pay fields updates them all. If user adds a new period with different hours and pay fields that period is unlinked and maintains its own values. User may edit a linked period and specify that this period has its own hours and pay values.
• Update the Appointment Request view to show more data on the default view (without clicking to drill down) and to clarify that this is a single request added by a specifc user.
• Update the worker view to show chronological upcoming Appointment periods where this worker has been requested. Clicking those periods leads to the Appointment Request detail view.
• System can provide current academic quarter. Used our UwQuarter shared library and shared data view maintained by "EDUC" project to have access to UW academic quarter actual dates.

Student

• Add single ethnicity value to student data. While student data includes multiple ethnicities per person we frequently have reporting requirements that ask us to simplify this data down into a single value per person to report demographically. We've made this aggregation part of the nightly student data update. This data is available to IR reporting, but not displayed in web application.
• The course planning report now accounts for milestones. Course planning report uses milestone configuration to show a list of student who need to take a given course. Version 1 of this just showed student information in relation to the specific course (completed, enrolled, need). Version 2 also examines the related milestones of the student to see whether the student has completed or enrolled in a comparable course (student took EDUC 305 or EDUC 310) or whether the requirement was waived.
• Fixed problem with downloading CSV spreadsheet of Generated Placement records.

Tech Support

• Import equipment inventory from spreadsheet for Cultivate Learning. Import process that converts spreadsheet to machine, specs, and person records in the COE ticket system.
• Replace URL generator that was using deprecated PHP function.

Infrastructure

• Configured mail on production web server to send server administration email to web administrator. 

2/5/2018 – 2/23/2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• Updated Apply portal for new applicant questions required for ECFS and ECO. The answers to these questions are now displayed in the Appreview applicant detail page in a section labeled "Supplements".

Courses

• Fixed person typeahead input in "Add Instructional Staff" form, was displaying ghost text in Mac Safari.
• Fixed instructors who were assigned to multiple meetings got double counted in the "John Smith +2" list views.
• Standardized system used to show and hide parts of a web page and ported code from old platform.
• Implement calculation and verification of projected enrollment and room size values. This ensures that these interrelated fields have consistent, logical values before storing in the database.

Recruitment

• Added better handling for email addresses rejected by mail server. Our system does email address validation on syntax, but doesn't verify that the email domain has a responsive email server to accept the message. Added strategy to deal with these outlier cases so entire email batches aren't stopped by one bad address.

Student 

• Reworked updates from student transcript to be more robust. In an attempt to minimize our footprint the student database would attempt to process transcript data once per quarter and only transcript data from the previous quarter. This ended up being fragile and not capturing the student history we needed. The revised system looks for any student who's last full transcript check happened before last quarters grades became available and then analyzes each student's full transcript. This gives a full fresh review of transcript and if anything goes wrong (UW data not available) the system automatically catches up the next run.

Tech Support

• Equipment records have "specs" which are hardware properties that can vary by equipment. For example it can be helpful for us to track the operating system of a laptop, but that has no real meaning for a flipcam. Tech team is able to dynamically create new spec categories as needed. Existing equipment data and web views have been converted to specs.

Infastructure

• Built a central dashboard which logs info system nightly maintenance jobs. Our college databases have around 15 distinct maintenance routines that run each night. Tracking these jobs was a tedious process that involved many log files and mail boxes and didn't get reviewed as frequently as I'd like. The new system shows all maintenance runs and any problems in a single view.
• Extracted code used to work with academic quarters into a shared library.

Work through Feb 2, 2018

This is catch up post for work complete over the last few weeks. It's been hectic with team transitions, but I will be getting back to regular updates. Thanks!

Work Complete

Appreview

• Support around Rubric assignment. The tool in Appreview that maps rubrics to applicants is not as clear as it should be. I've been helping people get their programs set up and we will build a better version after this major review cycle.
• Fixes to new faculty reviewer tools, notably the report filters on My Applications were not refreshing.
• Added an Incomplete Application report. This helps OSS during initial review and applicant communication.

Budgets

• Following budget changes are in development and under review by the fiscal team. The overall goal is to make the budgets database a helpful lookup for college faculty and staff.
  • Budget home page has prominent search tool and displays a list of "My Budgets" which is budgets where the current user is the Principle Investigator, the fiscal contact, or is "watching".
  • "Watch" budgets feature allows users to bookmark (aka star or tag) budgets they are interested in so they appear on their Budgets home page.
  • Fiscal team can add text notes to budgets visible to other users.

Courses

• Reworked the tool for adding instructional staff to course offerings. The old tool had an awkward grouping of people based on their previous roles. This has been replaced with a person search (type ahead suggestions) tool that allows any person in the system to be added in any role. The instructional staff roles have been reogranized to be clearer and to better align with fiscal office, HR, and payroll workflows. We've added more help text to the page to make selecting staff roles easier.
• Courses with multiple instructors are indicated on list views by "Jane Doe +2" in the instructor summary field. Clicking this value shows the full instructor list, without leaving the current list. Previously Courses database selected one instructor and used only that person's name in the report / list views. You couldn't see additional instructors until you clicked through to the offering details. 
• When setting the expected enrollment for a planned offering, user is presented with a list of previous offerings of that course. Offerings with the same section letter and quarter are highlighted and their average enrollment is suggested as plan enrollment. User can choose to add or remove other historical offerings from the average calculation.
  • This feature is a conceptual test. We are exploring whether there is an algorithm we can use to generate useful projected enrollments, fully automatically. This step takes a rudimentary approach and allows users to play with alternate approaches.
• We now identify college "Voting Faculty" based on appointment types. This data is checked from UW HR/P data nightly and updated in Courses database. List of current voting faculty is available in Courses.
• User list is broken into sections. Everyone who is currently an instructor has basic access to courses database so user list got hard to spot check. Breaking the list down by roles helps us regularly review who has escalated permissions.
• Final adjustment to an earlier quick fix that allows instructors to add comments to offerings when they are reviewing "My Courses".

Hiring Database

• We are building a new tool that will be a guided online version of the New Appointment Request Form (NARF, Blue form) and the Hourly Personnel Request (HPR). This is currently in early development. We are working out the data model and HR, Payroll, and Fiscal needs. Next stage will dig into Academic Support Team requirements.

Recruitment

• Fixed handling email address passed from previous form. The college website's "Connect with Us" form asks for an email address to help prompt the meaning of the field. What the user entered on college website was getting lost in transition to Recruitment database form, that is now fixed.

Student

• Added gender to data imported from UW SDB. This is not presented in the web application, but frequently required for reporting with demographics.
• Fixed CSV download for course need planning report.
• Review and adjustments to automatically created Tracked Issues. Missing some cases we wanted tracked.

Tech Support

• Fixed problem where the ticket department was not displaying correctly in the ticket search tool.

Infrastructure

• Did additional work on our Person search & select tool (Person Type Ahead) to make it more user friendly. Both the Tab key and Enter key will select the top (or auto completed) suggestion without submitting the entire form. Additionally we have a check icon and question icon to indicate to the users when a valid person has been successfully selected. The code was also made more reusable, the name of the value input is flexible and the tool supports having multiple Person Type Ahead inputs on a single page.
• Created a "Shared DB" space to allow college information system to expose data with each other at the database level. This allows us to have a single source of authoritative data, have a layer of abstraction so changes in one system do not break others, and to have good visibility into dependencies.
• Extracted the process that prepares CSV spreadsheet downloads into a shared utility. This was not handled consistently in all places which resulted in some browsers (Mac Safari) not opening some downloads with Excel.
• Wiki software updates for techwiki and coewiki.
• Starting to implement and test PHP 7.2 in development and testing environments.

 

11/20/2017 – 12/1/2017

Work Complete

Courses

• Remove legacy field "Buy-out Reason". Buy-outs have been replaced by "Course Releases" (which have "Course Release Reason") that better models what we want to track.
• Removed course tagging permission except for Academic Specialist. Tags apply to Courses (recurring curriculum) and we had issues where users wanted to adjust tags for specific Offerings (specific section scheduled in a quarter) which caused reports views in other areas of system to change. For now we are restricting ability to manage Tags and will capture requirements for better versions of this system in the future.

Hiring

• Begin work on a request tracking system for short term hiring. This will support requests currently covered by "New Appointment Request Form" and "Hourly Personnel Request Form" (aka Blue Form).

Recruitment

• On About Yourself form adjust input label for ask a question when form is in Keep Me Informed mode for ABA. This is the beginnings of a new feature where prospective students will be able to follow links from program pages and not be presented with the full (potentially confusing) college program list.

Student

• Update the program list to show a count of students enrolled in the program in the current quarter.
• Added a report of academic advisors grouped by new college areas with count of Masters and Doctoral advisees.
• Fixed error in Certificate Checklist report cause by student added to a cohort dropping out of program.

Infrastucture

• Data level sharing system so various college systems can reference each other's data, reducing risky application coupling.
• Move form lifecycle to shared library. This is application code where each project has a slightly different version of the same utilities. Packaging this code as a library allows it to be used by multiple projects via a dependency management system. This was implented for Hiring Database.

11/6/2017 – 11/17/2017

Work Complete

Appreview

• Added last update information to home page for users with settings roles. This helps surface any problems getting update application data from the Grad School.
• Added "Review Index" that lists all persons who are assigned reviewers on current applications. This view allows Academic Support Team and Student Services to support faculty reviewers by looking at application list from reviewer perspective.

Courses 

• Added projected enrollment field. This field is separate from the current offering size values (enrollment limit, enrollment estimate) whose primary purpose are room scheduling. The projected enrollment value will be used to project future course Student Credit Hours. Projected enrollment field will default to the room size limit/estimate, but is editable by instructor request, chair, or administrative staff.
• Updated all old references to "UWEO" to that organizations current name "UW Professional & Continuing Education", with abbreviation "UWPCE".
• Removed "ROU" field from new Course form.
• Project planning for updated instructional staff interface. We are starting a significant revision to how we represent staff associated with course offerings with the goals: 1. Make adding staff easier, 2. Make roles and workflow implications clearer, 3. Make instructional staff records more useful for fiscal, HR, payroll, reference.

Student

• Fixed quarterly status section on student detail so quarters are displayed in chronological order.
• Fixed dissertation milestone not being marked complete when 27 credits are completed.
• Added a download option for faculty's current advisees. Updated advisees complete download for previous database restructure.
• Added name matching rules for doctoral committee members added in MyGrad as external members. Only people who are Graduate Faculty in the UW Graduate School system get committee records linked to their UW person data. Other members are listed in text comment fields. This system allows us to configure which names to recognize in that text field and link local faculty records.

Infrastructure

• Investigated and resolved problem with asynchronous tasks (send email) not running in development and testing environment.

10/23/2017 – 11/3/2017

Work Complete

Appreview

• "My Applications" view is changed from card based dashboard to a table view. The table includes a column that shows all reviewers who have entered recommendations and a column showing which final decisions have been entered. It also has a column with thumbs-up/down icons to allow users to quickly scan where they have entered recommendations.
• Added a CSV download for reviewers that includes any reviewer (committee) recommendations. This CSV view is provided when a reviewer downloads from "My Applications" or from "By Committee" report.
• Reviewer recommendation tool is now displayed in a slide-out sidebar. This reduces visual clutter and allows clearer help text for scholarship comment.
• Final decisions form is also a slide-out sidebar. The forms for entering committee final decision and advisor have been combined. There is also a separate field for entering "review for scholarship". This same form is accessible from the "Enter Decisions" report view and from the application detail page.
• Implemented full menus as a slide-out sidebar.

Courses

• Fixed issue where Student Credit Hours did not calculate correctly on offerings with fixed credits where the course curriculum allowed variable credits.
• Added links for reports based on on instructor approvals.
• Updated top level menu pages. Clicking some menu titles in courses goes to specific index pages, these pages have been updated to include same links as menus.

Recruitment

• Program specific About Yourself form. Created a version of the About Yourself form for Applied Behavior Analysis where prospective students can complete contact and demographic information without the long (hard to read) program interest list. This page is the beginning of a larger project which will allow "Keep Me Informed" pages to be set up for any programs. 

 

9/25/2017 – 10/6/2017

Work Complete

Appreview

• Fixed Endorsement and Endorsement Requirements not getting added to new applications.
• Exposed list of Test Scores included in application view from UW Student Database. Tools for Student Services to adjust this configuration.
• Updated report filter time period to include upcoming years. This now queries actual application data and offers filter options for any year where we have applications.
• Added Red Flag feature to Appreview. Red Flags are important comments added by Office of Student Services that have major impact on admission decisions. Examples are insufficient GPA and TOEFL scores. Red Flag indicators are displayed on applicant list views and the full comments are displayed at the top of application detail page.

Budgets

• Added budgets for 2017-18 Biennium to Budgets index. Added tab interface that allows switching views between 2015 & 2017.

Courses

• Simplified Instructor review and approval of course plans. Before each quarter's entry into UW Time Schedule construction our Curriculum Coordinator asks instructors to review the course plan and enter room preferences. We have built a tool where instructors can review plan, enter room preferences, and add comments all in one place.
• Fixed bug in system that matches UW Time Schedule records to local plan records that could cause a canceled plan to not be highlighted as a difference.
• Implemented an automated testing framework for the Courses project. Initial tests for UWTS matching logic.
• Fixed bug where a missing value for a report parameter could cause the page to crash.
• ROUs (Responsible Organizational Units) have been removed from Courses database. As college structure has changed ROUs have become a less useful description of how course planning gets done. Removed to hide unuseful and stale information.

Students

• International students are indicated in Contact section of student detail.
• Fixed student search type-ahead suggestion, was showing quarter by quarter student history.
• R&I Paper Submitted added as a milestone for doctoral students.
• Fixed Reading Committee milestone, was being incorrectly marked complete. Discovered bug in data feed. Updated the doctoral committee import process with better preview and more data validation.
• Moved external students into general student model. External students are non College of Education students added to Student database to track certification, most often music students becoming music teachers. These records have been rebuilt so that they live in the same tables as COE students. Simplifies maintenance and querying. This also allows TEP students to be added to Student database during application process for certification tracking.
• Added link in Student… menu to Test Score database. Requires user authorization in Test Scores.
• Added link in Student… menu to Person log. This shows history and sources of person record updates. Requires user authorization in Person.

Tech Support

• Updated quarterly student import for recent Student database changes. This tool allows tech office to make current students active tech support database users for equipment reservations.

Test Scores

• Big improvements to Test Score requirement rules to more clearly show configuration and provide better tools to manage. Requirement Rules in Test Scores allow us to find and display import test scores for students based on the Washington state Teacher Certification and Endorsement Subjects the student is pursuing. One output for this linking is the Certification Checklist in Student database.

9/11/2017 – 9/22/2017

Work Complete

Appreview

• Fixed Person Data page which shows identifiers for other college and UW systems.

Courses

• Deployed update replacing Divisions/Associate-Deans with Areas and Area Chairs. Updating faculty affiliation with Areas. We are revisiting ROUs (Responsible Organizational Units are programs or groups who have responsibility for scheduling and staffing particular courses).

Recruitment

• Fixed problem with email template edit tool not saving changes.

Student

• Updated Complete (Degree Earned) display to include the degree name from the SDB. Allow entering of custom Program Complete names for manually added complete records. This is used for programs like Danforth where students can successfully complete without earning a UW degree.
• Include students with ELS minors in the college student database. Report of students with ELS minors and ability to look at student detail page and add tracked issues.
• Revision to local student data model to include minors. This changed the core representation of a "student" in the data and required updates to much of the application. In order to reduce chances of revisions like this in the future modified our local data model to closely track UW SDB student data model.
• Revised and simplified nightly data loads from the UW SDB. These various processes developed at different points in time had different structures. Revised to use shared resources and workflow for all, simplifies the ongoing support.
• Revision to local reports (various list views of students) in the system to use a more consistent base query and to better reuse helper strategies for fields like Program and Degree (translate UW codes into readable names). 

Infrastructure

• Hosted an Open House to solicate feedback on upcoming priorities. Review of the Open House available here.
• Data extracts for Washinton state required reporting.