Co-Op Student Evaluation Project

Meeting Minutes - 2/1/05

• General Notes
• Questions & Responses About Email System
• Questions & Responses About Forms

• Mark is going to give us DBA access to the database.
• Jim Bondi's concern:
  If somebody reviews a submission, how do people know that -- is there some indicator that shows that it has been accepted? Each form should also have a log on it.
• Status Update
  We are currently making progress on Iteration 1, and plan to have it done by Friday, February 4th.
• We need to turn in formal documents at some point during development.
  Dr. Naveda has identified that we need to write and turn in a design document, a requirements document, and a user's manual.
• Need system to send all student email messages to both the student's preferred and RIT email accounts.
• Jim Bondi pointed out a bug with the employer system
  Currently, both the saved version and the committed version of the employer's evaluation are being saved in the database, which is causing the database to grow unnecessarily. We should prevent this from happening on the student side, and attempt to fix this problem if we have a chance.
• We should add a hook to the system that would allow a future developer to add in a part that scans the submitted evaluations for keywords to make sure that the form is valid.
• Sections of the form (preliminary)
  The first part will be owned by the Co-Op office, and will contain their questions. The second part will be owned by the departments, and will contain all of their questions. Each part should only be editable by the people that own them. It is unclear at this time whether or not this should be seen by the student as two distinct forms (two different pages) or if this should all be on one page.

• Email contents
  They recently removed the due date from the production system since it required them to remember to manually update it, but they would like it in there if possible. Jim was unsure how departments might want to modify the contents of the email messages. One suggestion (that was agreed upon at this point) was to give the departments the ability to modify some of the text of the email, but not how the email message looks.
• Confirmation email for employers?
  Our new code can currently send out a confirmation email to any student or employer to confirm an evaluation submission, which was agreed that this is what the system should do. However, we are unsure at this time whether or not any email messages should be sent for changing an evaluation to another status. Jim pointed out that the employer system relied on a confirmation page containing the printable version of the evaluation to let employers know that they have successfully submitted the evaluation. However, this has not been working in many cases. Sending confirmation emails should alleviate this problem.
• Do department users need the ability to schedule emails?
  Currently, Jim sends Mark an import file which he runs to update the database. Mark then sends all of the pending email messages manually, by initiating the email service through the system. They stated that it was okay to do the student side the same way.
• Do we have the most up-to-date XSL files?
  Mark is not sure, since a change for the emails took place in the last week or so. So the version that we currently have in the test database may not be the same as the one in the production database.

• If a student notices any changes in their information, how should they change it?
  It was decided that we should allow the student to change their information on the evaluation form itself, but could only do so by deliberatly choosing to. When the student changes his or her information, the changes should be stored in a log in the database, which should be viewable from the administration and department sites. An email message could also possibly be sent out.
• Does the sample evaluation show all possible question types? Could there be more?
  The sample evaluation contains all of the possible question types that they can envision, and will likely be the evaluation used by the Co-Op office.
• Are the forms going to be broken up into two parts?
  The form will be borken up into two parts. The first part will be owned by the Co-Op office, and will contain their questions. The second part will be owned by the departments, and will contain all of their questions. Each part should only be editable by the people that own them. It is unclear at this time whether or not this should be seen by the student as two distinct forms (two different pages) or if this should all be on one page. They don't envision ever having more than two parts to the evaluation.
• Who is going to need to add forms to the system?
  Both the administrators and the individual departments will need to be able to add new forms to the system and modify existing ones.
• Is there any problem with modifying the employer forms to match the design of the student forms?
  No, there is no problem with this. Some suggestions that they made, though: there should be a distinction between the student and employer forms to make it easy to see which one you are looking at. This could be done through either different designs or color schemes.