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Project Overview
- Create front-end search form interface.
- Create front-end results display interface.
- Create an internal model to abstract the database details away from the HTML forms/display and other future clients (i.e. web-service provider). A possible interface for this model would be the CourseManagement OSID (detailed doc). This model will handle data access queries as well as security/authorization checks to ensure that users only access public, their own, or their advisee’s data. This model will include:
- Courses (accessible by id)
- Course sections (accessible by id)
- People (accessible by id) which may be in the role of instructors or students
- A course/section search interface. May use a SQL “WHERE” clause or a slight abstraction. Also allow full-text searching using GSA or Lucene.
- Bookmarks (accessible by person id)
- Create RSS feed of description information to the GSA.
- Single Sign On integration.
- Create database tables to store user information, including user-to-course bookmarks, etc.
- Create “shopping cart” form for users to select courses.
- Create per-user report of courses selected.
To Be Determined:
- What design template will be used for this service, given the likely transition of design as part of the web redo project?
- Will we import user-to-course information from Banner and sync this with the local user information? I image the only local information would be bookmarks, not enrollment info, so there shouldn’t be a need for synchronization. — Adam
Data that will live only with the course catalog and not in Banner:
- “Favorites” and/or contents of “shopping cart”
- URLs to course-related web sites, E-Reserves, etc?
Database Type/Location: MySQL
Language: PHP
We will not need to allocate additional hardware for this. It can run on the production machines for administrative web applications (diesel/fission) or on a dedicated virtual machine. The MySQL database can live on the dedicated MySQL host set up for Segue and other applications (coffer).
- Some course listings have formatted text, generally around book titles.
- Functional Area needs a method to enter and edit this text in Banner using a WYSIWYG interface
- This type of interface is not available in INB
- We will need to develop a Banner-connected form to allow for formatter text entry
This would be very similar to the Kenyon interface, but with the following changes:
- Search based on courses meeting one or more of the distribution and culture requirements.
- Allow choosing of future or past terms.
- Link the department name to the department’s listing.
- Link to an “offering” view that will display all sections of the offering.
- Link to an “instructor” view that will display all sections taught by the instructor.
Questions:
- Should sections of the same course be grouped together, or listed separately as in the Kenyon catalog?
- Should be able to browse a listing of “canonical courses” in the repetoir of a department, whether or not there is an offering in the current term/year.
- Also need to be able to list the “course offerings” for a department by term, as well as the individual sections available.
- Jason Mittell notes: “supporting cross-listed courses to feed into lists for both departments is really important”
- Title
- Description
- Prerequisites
- Distribution requirements the course fulfills
- Title (from course)
- Description (from course)
- Additional description for a specific section
- Prerequisites (from course)
- Distribution requirements the course fulfills (from course)
- Instructors
- Schedule
- Location
Log-in accomplished via the new Single Sign On system
A “shopping cart” or similar controls will allow students to choose courses or sections during their browsing and searching and keep them in a list that is available to them when they log-in.
This will allow students to see an overview of the week and how the courses they have chosen will line-up. Might be good to highlight overlaps.
In addition to the general “bookmark”, it could be useful to have a “my schedule” flag. The workflow in which this could be used is follows:
- Student searches through courses by term and department and finds and bookmarks many that they think look intersting.
- Student goes to their personal view and sees a listing of all of the courses that they bookmarked.
- Student adds 4 of the bookmarked courses’ sections to their “schedule” and views a rendered week-calendar with conflicts highlighted.
- Student moves sections in and out of their “schedule” until they are satisfied with their choices.
- At registration time the student attempts to register for the sections in their “schedule”. The other bookmarked courses still available in their list as backups in case a preferred section is filled. This prevents them from having to madly search for interesting, schedule-compatible sections during registration.
If we are also pulling enrollment information from Banner, the overview should have a toggle to show only enrolled courses, only bookmarked/MySchedule courses, or both. This will be helpful for students in working out their schedule during the drop/add period.
This will require additional data from Banner about students’ adviser assignment so as to properly authorize faculty to only see listings of their advisees. As well, this will keep the listing of advisees short.
This could include a listing of ISBNs, book citations, and/or links to the bookstore.
Other applications that might wish to access course information:
- Segue
- Moodle
- Personal home page widgets
- CMS Department sites / Faculty profiles
- Dynamic link to map entry for location information in search results
- Show path to courses
This could replace the current course-websites system and make the catalog the go-to place for all information about a course.
These additional links and information might live outside of Banner in the database that also stores user selections and other info.
This feature would allow students to select several courses and then do a search for courses that do not have scheduling conflicts with their current choices. Often finding a 4th class that fits in with one’s schedule can be a challenge. This search filter could aid that process.