Co-Op Student Evaluation Project

Meeting Minutes - 12/14/04

• General Notes
• System Run-Through
• Notification
• Reporting
• Questions
• To-Do

• Dr. Naveda suggests that we talk to other students to determine how they would like the forms to be.
• Don't know where the system is going to 'sit'
  • JobZone, SIS, etc.?
  • If it's on JobZone, we would prob. have access to information from co-op register form
    This information is stored on Jim's server, and is not currently linked to anything else.
  • Our system will not (currently) be tied into any other systems.
    We should plan to build it as it's own "web entity" (although integrated with the existing employee evaluation system). It will be run on a server run by ITS.
  • Our system should be able to get information from either the co-op registration form or from other RIT databases (LDAP, etc.), or possibly both.
• Students should have the ability to look at past co-op evaluations.
  • Should be able to see both their own and their employer's evaluations.
  • Should be a low-cost feature, and would likely be beneficial.
  • Student & employee evaluations should be linked.
  • Students should be able to see if their employer has submitted an evaluation for their current co-op.
• The system should not use JavaScript or cookies (as a security & reliability concern).
  • All state should be server-side.
• Some common problems with existing system(s) are incorrectly entered dates and email addresses by students.
  • We should try to determine ways to lessen the possibility of these errors in our system.
  • Might want to think of ways to use confirmation through email messages. We might want to have students validate their email addresses by clicking on a link in an email address that automatically gets sent to them during the evaluation process.
• Jim (and co-op department) would like the following:
  • To have all faculty members have access to the system.
  • To have the system go through ITS' current systems (help-desk, etc.).
  • To use existing systems for managing username & password information.

• When an incomplete form is saved, where should the data be stored?
  • Could possibly be stored in a new database table, or possibly in the table used for the complete form information.
  • The employee evaluation system used the following status information for evaluations:
    • 100 - pending
    • 150 - pass pending
      This status is currently set manually by the co-op office. It was added to keep track of employers that have not submitted an evaluation after a long period of time.
    • 200 - partially complete
      This status is set when the employer selects the "save" option.
    • 300 - complete
• When a student comes back to a saved (partially completed) form, what will he or she see?
  • Any questions not completed should be highlighted both through the use of color and some sort of icon.
  • Possibly un-highlight the questions as they are filled out.
  • Visual disabilities should be taken into consideration when determining how to highlight the questions.
• Once the form has been submitted, the system should give confirmation in the following ways:
  • System should send the student a confirmation email.
  • System should display a confirmation message and the completed form.

• Are student advisors still going to send email reminders (to fill out evaluations) once the system is up-and-running, or are they going to depend on our system to send the reminders?
• The system should notify students if they haven't completed their evaluation.

• Dr. Contomanolis may give us some standard reports that the system should be able to do.
• Dr. Naveda suggested letting users select combinations of data that they want to view.
• System should be able to export to both CSV (comma-separated value) and MS Excel formats.
• Users should be able to pull up information by quarter or status.
• Jim stated that the reporting is going to be mostly done by departments, not by the co-op office.
  • The co-op office will mostly be viewing the evaluations.

• When forms are changed, when should the change be reflected in the form shown to the students?
• Should students be able to change email (or any other possible) preferences through the system?
  • This will depend on where the information is stored.
• Whe will edit the forms (co-op office, individual departments, both)?
• How are the forms currently modified (new ones added, old ones modified)?
  • Should this be changed at all?
• How are new forms brought on line?
• How are we going to get student email addresses if they haven't used our system before?
  • Where does the employee system get their email addresses?
  • Confirmation of email addresses should probably be handled by the co-op registration form.
• How will the system get the students currently on co-op?

• Need to go over concept diagram with Dr. Contomanolis & Jim.
• Weren't able to get a list of issues that ITS encountered or changes they made.
  We should still try to get this information from somebody.
• Need to get a concept of the form layout (and possible breakup).
• Need to try and determine what the peak load is on the current system.
  Should get this from ITS.
• We need to find out how much access we are going to have to the new LDAP system.
• By the end of this week (12/17/04), we need to have the following completed:
  • A (tentative) schedule for the project. — Chris
  • A list of all requirements / main features determined up to this point. — Entire Team
  • Investigation into bug/feature tracking software (most likely Bugzilla) and how to get it running on our team account. — Tom
  • An updated project plan document. — Patrick
  • Investigation into development tools & set up development box. — Dan