Category: Work Reviews

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.

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.

 

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.

Aug 1 – Aug 12, 2016

Work Complete

Appreview

• Can now add users that don't have a person record in the system.

Courses

• Fixes in Uwnetid scrubber
• Form defaults for course releases to speed data entry.

Student (STEP)

• Report that lists edTPA scores for all students in a TEP cohort.

Student 2

• Requirements gathering, meetings with SMEs including ECFS, TEP, OSS. Work out plan for Credit Counts, Milestones, and Placements.

Tech Support

• Add departments to ticket system to allow Haring Center support requests to be tracked in same system.
• Update email ingestion to allow email to eeutech@uw.edu to go to ticket system and to automatically be assigned Haring Center department.

Infrastructure

• Build new web servers for Institutional Research. Install infrastructure software, applications and databases.
• Move EDUC project to default application. Configure new server for UW authenticated portal and anonymous portal.
• Redirect application that will display "Down" message during migration and then redirect to new server after.
• Refine Shibboleth configuration and install notes. Shibboleth was having trouble redirecting back to the server after login in some cases.
• Deploy scripts that sync bigweb to the new IRPROD server to make migration day fast and accurate.

 

7/18/2016 – 7/29/2016

Work Complete

We were able to dig into our UW institutional Amazon Web Services (AWS) account this cycle. AWS offers basic machine virtualization (EC2), but its more exciting features are the specialized services: object storage (S3), container hosting, specialized database services, etc. To make good use of AWS application should be architected to use services that support its components.

Our immediate need is development and staging environments for our production web server. Staging especially needs to be a close functional replacement for production. Getting AWS to closely emulate our UW production server means additional time and expense.

AWS is competitively priced, but it is not cheap. Our largely idle EC2 instance used for early testing was ringing up about $1.25 a day. Comparing that to UW-IT lowered rate on Hosted Virtual Machines and we are not saving much with AWS.

So seeing extra administrative effort, poor replication of production environment, and comparable costs we have decided to put our staging environment on a UW-IT Hosted VM. This process will also move internal facing Institutional Research information systems to a separate server from the public facing college websites.

Appreview

• Validate that rubric scope is unique and provide helpful form error. Rubric scope maps specific rubrics to applicants to specific programs and years.

Student 2

• Settings tools to configure faculty.

Jul 5, 2016 – Jul 15, 2016

This cycle we continued work on Student 2. We did some requirements drafts and mock-ups on major features that will be enhanced in Student 2: Credit & GPA counts, Placements, and Milestones. In the next couple weeks we will be meeting with subject matter experts in the college to ensure the new build is a significant useful enhancement.

Work Complete

Appreview

• Validation on external user edit form to ensure that login string is unique.

Courses

• Refinement to view titles and menus to help clarify user navigation.
• Course load report has UI so associate deans can look at views per faculty.

Student 2

• Client side application to load current registration and transcript into student detail page.
• Display student picture on detail page. Implemented the UW ID Card photo web service.
• Show groups (including cohorts) on the student detail page.
• Reformatted student header block with photo, current program, advisor, and groups.
• Report of students by cohort. Cohort menu is a dynamic expandable tree.
• Report of students On Leave last quarter showing status this quarter. Graduate students previously On Leave must extend leave or register before end of current quarter or they lose status.
• Report of student inactive for over a year.
• Doc Committee displayed on student detail page.
• Requirements documents, implementation plan, mock-ups for Credit & GPA, Placements, and Milestones. Prep for meetings with SMEs.

Tech Support

• Created a detailed work plan for adding department to the tech support ticket system. This will allow Haring Center to use the tech support database for ticket and inventory tracking.

Test Scores

• Add a test score assessment type.

Infrastructure

• Upgraded EDUC project to Laravel 5.2. This version included binary file response used to add student Husky ID Card photos to Student 2.
• Amazon Web Service UW account set up. 
• Research and planning for Splunk implementation. Splunk is a log file analysis platform that will allow us to get actionable highlights and summaries from server and application data.

Jun 20, 2016 – Jul 1, 2016

Work Complete

Courses

• Brainstorming and planning around sharing Courses with other units. Several other units have expressed interest if having a tool for course scheduling like ours. We are exploring workable ways to support them. Initially we have set up a demo site for other UW users to explore.
• Authorization system for course release.

Person

• Modify the person update process (name changes, logging) to allow processes that preview changes without committing them.

Student 2

• Import Grad School Doctoral Committees data. Link to existing person data where possible for coherent searchable record but allow for external committee members. New system keeps historical committee data with effective end quarters. Ran updates for available import files (year's worth).
• Faculty list and faculty detail page. Faculty detail page includes advisees and committee roles.
• Advisor on student detail page.
• Scheduled jobs for updating Student 2 nightly on production.
• Connector to UW Student Web Service (SWS) to get student current registration and transcript data. System to lookup course titles from UW SWS and cache them locally to speed transcript load times.
• Stand alone page view of registration and transcript. Client side application will load these views into the student detail page on activation (same behavior as STEP).

Infrastructure

• Progress toward getting a UW account set up for Amazon Web Services. 
• Meetings with UW-IT and tech staff at Computer Science about strategies for security hardening web servers and applications.

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.

May 9, 2016 – May 20, 2016

This cycle we keep moving forward on recent projects Test Scores new model, Student UW data model, new server infrastructure and faculty merit report.

Work Complete

Students

• Added IAL Coaching as pathway in STEP.
• Database and model build for new student data model.
• Continue work on process for loading student data from UW Enterprise Data Warehouse. Got load process rebuilt and functional, but need further work for eccentricities in UW "On Leave" data.

Test Scores

• Updated add score forms for new test score data model.
• View Test Score types and Assessment types in web interface. Edit Assessment types.
• Add CBEST test scores to configuration. Add form for CBEST.

Infrastructure

Plan for new COE public web site server and separate info system server. This will be built on new servers and existing web servers retired after completion.

Plan for in place transition from RHEL 6 to CentOS 6 for existing web servers by 7/30.

Work Planned

Courses

• Approvals for course releases

Test Scores

• Update add test score forms for new model
• Edit tools for test score types and assessments
• Too for add CBEST scores

Students

• Finalize name and update logic for Current / Latest records
• Automated import from EDW for current, complete, major-quarter
• Beginning of student view in new system
• Student search

Infrastructure

• Long term plan for server function and build for information systems and websites
• Create a build & migration plan including handling July 30 deadline for RHEL
• Context menu – migrate system to use educ version
• Convert UI of educ to bootstrap for better mobile (touch & small screen) support