Cycle 112

Travel & Requisitions

I’ve started a new project to faciltate requests relating to travel and requisitions.

The goal is to take workflows and user interface that we worked out for appointment requests in the NARF project and apply them to travel and purchasing. Our goal is create a clear and focused form that uses our institutional data to provide help and sensible defaults.

Currently we are iterating through prototypes with the fiscal team, deciding what the core required fields of a request and developing processes to handle requests.

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Fix error in rubric score administration.

Student

(Complete) Add placement view by cohort. This new tool is intended to help program directors and administors maintain placement records. It shows a list of all students in a given cohort and all placements associated with those students while they were enrolled in the cohort major.
(Complete) Fix program completes were not represented on student list views. System automatically displays degree earned information from official UW record, but we also provide a way to record when students successfully complete a program without earning a UW degree. These “Program Complete” records were displaying correctly on the individual student record, but were not represented in the “Latest Status” column shown on table views of multiple students.
(Complete) Add tools for creating Cohort Groups. While most of the cohort configurations in our college Student database include rules to automatically create and populate individual cohort groups a few must be populated manually. This change allows program administrators to create cohort instances as needed.
(Complete) Mentor search. In the Placements section, the Mentors index page show a list of mentors in placements over the recent year. There is a search field at the top of that page that can be used to search for specific mentors, including mentors from older placements.
(Complete) Add WA Certificate numbers to mentor payment report. This helps with payment processing and provides another opportunity to review missing data for end-of-year PESB reporting.
(Complete) Fix save mentor displayed error. Mentor was saving correctly but redirecting to invalid URL.
(Complete) Authorization request log updated for generated unique HTML id system.

Test Scores

(Complete) Clean up import preview. Administrative interface supports importing test scores from agency provided data files. Previous version displayed the entire import file followed by list of import previews. This was hard to spot check without scrolling back and forth. Now import tool shows one agency record followed by its import preview, then the next agency record, …

Infrastructure

(Complete) Fixed other database menu always went to About page. Clicking the COE or W logo in upper right of a college database shows a menu of all college databases. Intended behavior is that menu leads directly to the target database if the user is logged in and authorized, otherwise to an About page
(Complete) Upgrade third party libraries.

Cycle 111

12/30/2019 – 1/24/2020

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Delete rubric score was (working, but) displaying an error message. This has been corrected.

Student

(Complete) Add placements view by Cohort. This new report includes all students in a given cohort and all placements for those students that occurred while the student was enrolled in the cohort major. This view helps program directors review and update their placement records for student teaching.
(Fixed) Program completes are now correctly represented on list views of students. Programs where students may successfully finish a program without earning a UW degree (example: Danforth) may enter “Program Complete” in the college Student database. Previously these completes appeared on the student detail page, but not on pages that have a table list of students with a status column.
(Complete) WA State Teacher Certificate number is included on Mentor Payment report.
(Complete) Added search tool to placement mentor list.
(Complete) Added tools to create new Cohort instances (student groups) from the Cohort Settings page. Most Cohort are automated rules which create and populate new Cohort instances. A few Cohort types do not have rules and groups must be created and populated by staff.

Person

(Fix) Authorization request log helper once again provides default log messages.

Test Scores

(Complete) Rework test score import preview to display the source record adjacent to its parsed import record preview. Previously all of the source records were displayed in a table, then all of the import previews followed. New view is easier to spot check.

Infrastructure

(Fixed) Other database menu (click COE logo in upper right of any college database) always took user to an About page. Now, if user clicks menu from a context where they are logged in and they have permission on the target system they are taken directly to their destination.

Cycle 110

12/31/2019

Last few weeks have include substantial work on Placement data in the college Student database. I’ve also been doing early stage work on a couple of new projects:

Update to the college Course Planning database that will modernize the user interface and make the back-end synchronize processes more robust.
Prototype of a system to handle travel approval and reimbursement requests.

Work Complete

Student

(85% complete) Major reworking of Placement tooling. See the Placements Revision article for details.
(Complete) PESB bulk update tool has log last Weeks, Hours, Experience applied to a given quarter.
(Fixed) Bug was causing multiple Tracked Issue records to be created in Student database based on Tracked Issues in Applicant Review.

Test Scores

(Complete) System chooses what ACT and SAT test types to import from UW Data Warehouse based on certification requirement rules, adding a new rule will cause the rule’s test variant (assessment) to be imported into local college database and available on Basic Skills and Certification tools.
(Complete) Add new SAT test types.

Placements Revision

In Autumn 2019 we implemented a major revision to student placement data in the college Student database. Here are the motivating factors.

Additional fields need to be tracked for Washington state PESB reporting.
Placement data has substantial set of tools and reports and these were difficult to find within the Student database menus and links.
Important fields only appeared deep in the interface.
We want to delegate management of placement data to programs. Placement edit form was hard to use.

Placement Context

To begin addressing these issues we moved “Placements” out into its own application context. This means a view of the application that has a Placements title, menu, and home page. Within the Placements context we can make assumptions about what the user is trying accomplish and provide focused navigation and support.

Career Data

Historically we had treated outside “Career” data as a type of placement. The Career records could theoretically contain any external positions of our students (e.g. alumni jobs). In practice these records are almost entirely based on import of Washington state OSPI public school teacher and administrator data.

To support career data we have added several fields to described jobs at schools. These fields were rarely useful for actual student experience placements and resulted in a long form with a lot of optional fields, distracting from the important information.

To resolve this, we have moved Career data into their own set of records, leaving the existing Placement records focused on learning experiences of current COE students.

Placement Report

We added a general placement report. User can filter this report to specific academic quarter and placement type.

Student View

Previously, in the college Student database, Placements were represented as a custom block. As placement lists got long this view was hard to scan for important information.

The revised version lists Placement records as a table view with the few critical fields highlighted. When a table row is clicked on a slide-out sidebar shows the details of that placement.

Notes

Notes can be attached to a placement record. Notes are visible in the placement detail sidebar.

Placement Form

The Placement add/edit form has been cleaned up to make it easier to use.

Fields related to career records are removed.
Placement periods styles (quarter, academic year, dates) can be changed.
New institution can be added within the form.
Mentors can be edited within the form.

Help Pages

Added a system to display help articles as slide-out sidebar. This allows us to give users access to extra explanation and instructions where they need it.

The system is initially used for the new Placement Form.

Cycle 109

10/21/2019 – 11/1/2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Done) Button to import ACT/SAT scores from central UW SDB. Our bulk import of test scores only looks for recent test scores. Occasionally applicants have applicable ACT/SAT test scores from 10+ years back. Our staff has ability to add these scores as Basic Skills Evidence with one click.
(Done) Certificate records for applicants that do not enroll are deleted with application, approximately 1 year after processing.
(Fix) User authorization page was showing double labels for check boxes.

Courses

My next major projects are in the Courses database. While I am building out new features I plan to update the interface and aggressively strip out unused features. We also want to move this project to a more modern and robust software stack.

We’ve shared the Courses project with other UW units, but now are planning substantial changes for COE business processes. I’ve created a new project fork allows us more freedom to make substantial changes.

(Done) Create new Courses project in version control system.
(Done) Implement two stage bootstrapping that allows legacy Course application and new Laravel based application to run from the same project code base and same root URL.

NARF (Hiring)

(Done) Show all other current requests on appointment request detail page. Previously this only showed requests that had overlapping appointment dates. New view provides more complete context. “Current” is defined as requests for future dates or a request whose end date has not yet passed.
(Done) Quarter date helper improved. The original quarter date picker showed a chronological academic year based on the appointment period start, this wasn’t always a helpful suggestion list, especially at the end of an academic year. New tool starts with the quarter that includes the appointment period start and also shows the next three quarters, summer terms, and academic year. A radio checkbox indicates when the appointment period dates exactly match a quarter.
(Done) Change input label to “Current Worker Status”. The goal is to help user understand that form is asking for worker status as of “today”, “Does this worker have a current active UW appointment?”
(Done) Next Request button for HR approvals. Provide routing to allow HR review to happen sequentially without returning to list view of requests.
(Done) Add new position type “Student: Research Hourly”.
(Done) Add “Appointment Canceled in Workday” request status and banner message. This is used occasionally when a request was fully processed, but the appointment was later canceled. WARNING: The scope of NARF is only New Appointment Request processing, it does not attempt to represent the current status of active appointments. This new feature is a gray area exception that properly describes the outcome of the request.

Student

(Done) Purge old mentor roles with goal of labeling student teaching mentors as “Lead Mentor” or “Mentor”. Work with Institutional Researcher and TEP team to identify unused historic mentor role on student placement record. Deleted or renamed old mentor relationships.
(Done) Mentor payment report is now based on mentors with new role label “Lead Mentor”.

Test Scores

(Fixed) Visiting the URL for step 2 of add-test-score workflow caused an error. Now it redirects back to beginning of process.
(Complete) The test score person match routine (compare agency test data to college applicants and students and link test scores) now also updates Basic Skills

Infrastructure

(Fixed) Focus search box after animation. Previously on clicking the Search button the cursor would be placed in search field and then an animation would slide the search panel down into view. In Chrome, the browser’s search suggestions would be rendered at the original search input position, after the slide the input was covered by suggestions. This fix allows the browser suggestion list to align correctly.
(Done) Upgrade NARF project to Laravel 6.X. Also upgrade JavaScript build dependencies and security issues.
(Done) Upgrade EDUC project to Laravel 6.X. Investigate and resolve slow style sheet build times. This was caused by URL transformation plugin that our project was not using.
(Done) Upgrade AddCodes project to Laravel 6.X.

Cycle 108

10/7/2019 – 10/18/2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Add Delete Preview report. This report show the applications that are queued for delete as of current quarter. This gives program staff a solid list to verify when we send out quarterly delete warning email.
(Complete) Improve application detail page layout to make better use of multiple screen sizes. Set a maximum content width, after this max is reached left and right margin is added. Increase gutter size on large screens. Reduce margins on small screens.
(Fixed) Note fields on application detail page utilize full width of the right-hand column.

Student

(Complete) Revise Mentor index page to focus on current mentors and help spot check missing data. Mentor index now includes only mentors from placements in the last year and with the mentor role “Lead Mentor”. The page also shows mentor institution, email, and WA Certificate Number.
(60%) Plan process to simplify mentor roles on student placements. We have historical placement records with role descriptions of questionable use.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Refactor report filter system so new report filters only need to be configured in one place and filter properties are discovered and shared from this central definition.

Cycle 107

9/23/2019 – 10/4/2019

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Add a Certification tracking report in Applicant Review. This report shows the expected certification and endorsements of applicants along with their Basic Skills assessments.
(Complete) Add Enrolled flag to Application records that is set when an applicant enrolls in the program and quarter of their application. This flag will be used to give better “Intent” description, to sync application material with student database, and to provide better visibility about how application will be handled when it is time to delete.
(Complete) Create a Tracked Issue feature in Applicant Review. Tracked Issues already exist in student and we had items marked as “contingencies” in Applicant Review that would transfer to Student. I hope to make both systems clearer by providing the same feature in both systems. When an Applicant is enrolled tracked issues sync from Applicant Review to Student.
(Complete) Built a Tracked Issue launch routine that finds existing Student Tracked Issues to prevent duplication.
(Complete) Revised application Material UI to make the section easier to read and to add Tracked Issue flags. Issues formerly marked “contingency” are now Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Endorsement Requirements could be marked “contingency”, these are now Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Contingency Report is replaced with a Tracked Issue report. This report captures items from Material, Endorsement Requirements, and other manually added Tracked Issues.
(Complete) Added coding for new Grad School application status indicating “Deferred”. This code has the official description and is used to provide better applicant “Intent” description.

Student

(Complete) Add new mentor roles that support PESB reporting. “Lead Mentor” is the default role for first mentor added to a placement, “Mentor” is default for any additional mentors.
(Complete) Add new mentor form that allows user to add Washington Teacher Certificate Number and email address of the mentor.
(Complete) When mentor records are saved during placement edits, automatically associate mentor with a specific institution (school), creating new mentor records as needed. This will allow for safe updating of mentor records within a focused scope.
(Complete) Basic Skills and selected test score evidence is displayed in certification checklist tool. Users have access to choose evidence scores from this interface.
(Complete) Ability to delete certificates through UI.

Test Scores

Change PESB coding for test agencies. Update test score import processes to match new coding.

Cycle 106

July 11, 2019 – September 20, 2019

My main project continues to be a collection of improvements around certification tracking to Student Database and Applicant Review Database that are instigated by state reporting requirements, but should provide some nice improvements for users in the college. Read about the project plan for Certification Updates.

Work Complete

Applicant Review

(Complete) Use shared Certificate HTML view from Student in Applicant Review.
(Complete) Update Application data model to track whether applicant is pursuing initial teacher certification.
(Complete) Basic Skills are shown in Applicant Review for applicants pursuing certification. Available test scores are automatically match to basic skills categories using college selection logic. Specific scores can be selected by staff.

Complete

(Fixed) Faculty activity report updated for recent change from “ROU” to course “Owners”. Report filter is working again.
(Fixed) Faculty activity report updated for course “Owners”.

Budgets

(Complete) Switch to 2019 Biennium. 2019 is now the default view for Budgets database. 2017 metadata was copied to matching 2019 budget numbers. View can be switched to 2017, 2015 is archived.

Hiring

(Fixed) Request status was not always updating. In order to provide the home page view that shows last step complete and next step needed, appointment requests need to be analyzed after each user interaction. A couple interactions were not triggering this process, resulting in incorrect status on the home page.
(Complete) Updated person information flows down to NARF Worker records. Our college databases import person information from multiple sources (e.g. student, employees). We now have a process where the official UW data will update NARF worker records.
(Complete) Updated the notification from email address to coepay@uw.edu.

Recruitment

(Complete) Added an RSS feed of upcoming recruitment events. This allows the public college website to automatically add those events to its calendar.

Student

(Complete) Move “Completes” to its own nightly update job. Completes (or degrees earned) was part of the large multi-step “Student Update”, but this backward looking record has a distinct time frame from (forward looking) enrollment records and records were occasionally missed. Making this a separate process allows it to have its own job parameters.
(Complete) Update certification data model to better support reporting requirements and business processes. Moved certification to its own database and application namespace for clarity and maintenance. Built an run migration processes to transform existing records.
(Complete) Implement Certification Checklist as a per certificate child record. Previously a checklist applied to a Student. This opens the implementation for custom checklists for different certificate types.
(Complete) Basic Skills, as entered in Applicant Review, are displayed and editable through Student database.

Tech Support

(Complete) Change text encoding scheme to handle wider character set. Ticket system can now handle full UTF8 4 byte character set (e.g. ?). Now that we have email ingestion for ticket issues we are dealing with a wider variety of input.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Automatically increment resource caches during deployment. This ensures that users get latest version of included web page resources (style sheets and JavaScript application).

Cycle 105

Through 7/10/2019

Work Complete

This is a catch-up post for several weeks worth of work. During the end of the academic year and start of Summer I have been focusing on planning for the coming year and catching up on small fix and maintenance backlogs.

Applicant Review

(Complete) Improved matching of application records to enrolled student records for undergraduate programs. Application records are deleted after UW retention period. Selected application material is preserved as part of Student Database record if the application matches to a student enrollment. However the original matching logic was too specific and failed to recognize some undergrad applicants as enrolled students due to different pathway codes (0 or 10) or because they changed major after the quarter they applied for. New matching logic handles those scenarios.

Courses

(Complete) Canceled offerings can be un-canceled through the web UI by user with appropriate role.
(Complete) Changed ROU (“Responsible Organizational Unit”) to “Owner”. This newly labeled entity has the same meaning: a person or group within the college that is responsible for scheduling and staffing a given Course. Added tools for managing Owner configuration. Current Owner data is based on existing ROU records that are out of date and need attention, this field is only exposed on administrative screens until an Owner refresh is completed.
(Complete) Added “Area” as application entity. Previously areas were implemented as ROUs that had their own child ROUs. This added code complexity when associating faculty with areas. Area as its own concept is cleaner.
(Complete) Added Budget Number and Summer Budget Number fields to Course. Provide interfaces for adding Budget Numbers to system. Budget Numbers will be entered by fiscal team to show what budgets pay for staffing.
(Complete) Revised the Course management tools to support assigning course metadata including Wildcard Titles, Owner, Budgets, and Tags.
(Complete) Substantial infrastructure revision that makes the overall application faster and more memory efficient. Additionally this change improves code separation and removes some significant sources of repetitive code making the project easier to maintain.

Hiring NARF

(Complete) Revised the budget entry tool to get rid of the “Split Budget Period” tool. This tool had a bug where user could accidentally shorten the overall budget date range to not match the total appointment period. Plus it was just clunky. New version allows user to edit the start date when adding a budget (after the first, which much match full appointment period). When budgets are added with different start dates existing budgets are automatically adjusted to create a new budget period.
(Fixed) Budget tool could get locked for specific user no longer accepting any input. Tracked down and fixed a problem with form validation that was creating an endless error loop in user’s session data.

Recruitment

(Fixed) Group names that were too long for the database field caused unhandled error. Made the database field substantially larger to handle most cases and truncate input that still doesn’t fit extended field.

Student

(Fixed) Student header block view will work even when the target student is missing expected data. The student database may include people who do not have COE student records: added for certification or had a COE major and then dropped registration or changed majors. The standard student header would fail in these cases keeping the rest of the page from rendering.

Cycle 104

5/13/2019 – 5/25/2019

Work Complete

Appreview

(Complete) Update report filter “Period” to only show years and quarters where applications exist. Follow up to deleting historical applications.

Courses

(Fixed) Add Joint Section tool was not parsing non COE curriculum abbreviations.

Student

(Ongoing) Investigate and test import of Complete (i.e. degree earned) records for students who earned their degree in a quarter they were not enrolled.
(Complete) Add system key to all CSV spreadsheet downloads. Removed database view that provided old implementation of external students.

Tech Support

(Complete) Change database character set to UTF8. This resolved an error creating new tickets when pasting in ticket content with special characters.

Test Scores

(Complete) Build an import process for Praxis test scores.
(Complete) New detail view for test scores, better highlight key score information. Make room for new score annotation tools.
(Complete) Can add notes to test scores.
(Complete) Local UW pass/fail evaluation can be added to test scores. This supports edTPA where UW has a higher pass criteria than WA state. When UW pass/fail is set, it will supersede the agency pass/fail evaluation.
(Complete) Add score tool for local re-submit. Supports recording scores when students re-submit sections of edTPA for local UW evaluation.
(Complete) Change edTPA sub-score labels to match names of rubrics.

Infrastructure

(Complete) Upgrade Laravel application framework to 5.8 for EDUC project (Appreview, Student, Testscore, Budget) and NARF (Hiring database).