| While the development and shared use of software was
not the primary goal of WISP, the group produced dozens of valuable
pieces of software. In some cases, code was jointly developed and
implemented; in other cases, code that was developed at one institution
was provided to the other institutions for testing and feedback. In
many more cases, however, inter-institutional collaboration occurred
at the level of functional specification and system design. Thus,
for example, Swarthmore's analysis and design of a budget reporting
tool--developed in Java--heavily
influenced the creation of budget reporting software built by Reed.
The design of a web-based registration system co-developed by Occidental
and Reed in Tango, served as a model
for Vassar's registration system that was built in PHP.
Vassar's development of an institutional advancement datamart played
a major role in the design and implementation of similar datamarts
at Occidental and Reed. Instances of this type of information sharing
and collaborative problem solving flourished during the third and
fourth years of the project. We provide below brief descriptions of
some examples of software modules developed under the auspices of
the WISP project. |
| Academic Advising
Sheet |
[Swarthmore] Swarthmore's Academic
Advising Sheet is PHP based utility that enables faculty to
view student transcript information quickly and easily. The utility
touches the database directly, thereby eliminating the need for an
intermediate datamart. The Advising Sheet also has a two-way link
to the Student Locator (see below) to make it easy to navigate between
the two utilities.
|
| Admission Dashboard |
[Occidental] Occidental's success at producing larger
and more talented applicant pools every year in the past five years
has increased the complexity of the admission process, largely because
the yield rates vary with academic level, geographic location, and
ethnicity of the applicants. As a result, admission staff and senior
officers have had an increasingly difficult time sifting through data
to keep track of admission progress. Under the auspices of the WISP
project, a new system was developed that allows senior officers and
staff in the Admission Office to track the admission process along
several dimensions and see the results graphically or in tables. The
information displayed in simple dashboard
screen layouts replaces and enhances reports that were often hundreds
of pages long. The system is now in production and has been demonstrated
to a number of colleges besides the WISP institutions.
View
screenshot |
| Admission Interactive Forms |
[Reed] Reed has developed a variety of web forms for
prospective students who are at various stages of the recruitment
and application process. These include interactive pages that provide
information about the college and enable prospective students to update
their addresses and academic interests, request additional information
about specific aspects of the college, or schedule visits to the campus.
Students who apply to Reed can use these pages to login and check
the status of their applications. Reed is currently expanding its
interactive admission pages to include the entire set of forms entering
students must complete before arriving on campus. |
| Alumni/Development
Ad-hoc Reporting |
[Occidental] This web-based system allows staff in
Alumni and Development to obtain over 80% of their reports without
programmer assistance. Discussions among the WISP group about web
reporting tools such as Brio and
Oracle Discoverer convinced Occidental
that most of Alumni/Development staff would never be able to write
such programs––and having the technical staff write them
inevitably results in errors and delays. The system is table driven
so that changes in the fields or the selection values available for
use can be made by changing data in Oracle
tables rather than by changing the code of the middleware programs.
|
| Budget Reporting &
Viewing |
[Reed] A budget information module Reed has developed
enables department chairs and other authorized persons to review the
status of all the accounts under their purview. This software provides
account managers with flexible reporting options, including the ability
to search for any account on current or past fiscal years as well
as date ranges that span fiscal years. Users may then drill down to
the details of individual transactions. The budget information module
is incorporated into Reed's Information
Gateway, a portal-like structure that was developed under the
auspices of an earlier Mellon grant.
[Swarthmore] Swarthmore developed a tool to enable staff in their
Business Office to provide access to payroll and fringe benefit information
to employees. No technology staff assistance is needed when the Business
Office wants to add a new user to the system.
[Vassar] As part of the rollout of SCT's Employee
Self Service module, Vassar customized the budget reporting
tool. By default, the Self Service
product has the ability to display payroll and benefit information,
but these feature are available only in a limited way. Vassar expanded
the functionality and is continuing to work on enhancements for the
product.
|
| Campus Directories |
[Occidental] Occidental developed web-based systems
that allow easy lookup of students, faculty, or staff. As a security
measure, the directory design allows information to be restricted
if viewed from off campus. The student directory enables students
to update their own directory entry once they have logged in and authenticated
themselves.
[Reed] Paralleling the work at Occidental, Reed is creating a new
campus directory system. In addition to the public viewable web directory,
the system includes a secure on-campus directory that allows users
to hide and show contact information as they choose. The directory
enables users to submit address changes––a particularly
complex task for students, since they may have as many as four active
addresses. The address update module is based on the system that Occidental
designed and shared with Reed.
[Vassar] A campus directory development project is currently underway,
having been initiated through WISP discussions. This directory will
provide a common place for faculty to post office hours, provide general
department information, and be used to feed faculty information for
department web pages. |
| Class Lists/Grade
Sheets |
[Swarthmore] The Class List page was one of Swarthmore's
earliest projects and is written in perl. Students and faculty can
search by academic subject area to see all courses in a given term
and faculty can authenticate themselves to see their own courses.
The page displays a list of students in a class including their full
name, email address, class year, credits attempted, registration date,
registration status, and grade mode. A link is provided at the bottom
of the page that allows faculty to send email to the entire class.
Grade Sheets are accessible only to the course instructor. They include
an intelligent link to the Credit/No Credit Evaluation page showing
whether an evaluation is necessary, in progress, or completed. |
| Course Registration
|
[Reed/Occidental] Throughout the fall and winter
of 2003, Reed worked closely with Occidental to create a modular,
optimized version of web-based online course registration software
co-developed by the two colleges earlier in the WISP project. The
code was completely redesigned and rewritten in a newer version of
Tango. In addition to a more navigable
user interface, the new version introduced significant improvements
in performance, reliability, and maintainability. Reed went live with
the new system in spring 2003 and it performed beautifully. Reed believes
that the system provides an outstanding model of user-friendliness
for online registration. The software has been given to Occidental
and will be put into production this coming spring.
View
screenshot
[Vassar] Through a web interface, students rank their course selection
for the upcoming semester. Based upon a lottery, courses are then
assigned and loaded into Banner. The system was initially implemented
in October 2002 and enhanced in spring 2004 to include course registration
for entering freshmen. The Course Registration system overcomes the
“standard” method of registration inherent in the Banner
system and accommodates the college's strong desire to keep its particular
(and different) approach to pre-registration intact. |
| Credit/No Credit
Evaluation Form |
[Swarthmore] This utility is written in PHP and integrated
with academic information pages. It simulates the original paper form
that faculty were required to fill out when evaluating a student's
performance in courses. The web form automatically includes information
such as student name, course name, course number, semester and instructor.
The instructor indicates whether or not the student should receive
credit, the grade (if the course is taken for credit), and comments
regarding the student's performance. Copies of the evaluation are
then emailed automatically to the instructor, the student, the student's
faculty advisor, and the Dean's Office. |
| Curricular Change
Request Form |
[Vassar] This is a web-based form with workflow components
for the processing of course changes and committee approvals. Development
began in April 2003 and was brought into full production in September
2004. The concept of automating the course catalog was a central topic
of WISP discussion––this form covers the majority of the
data included in the catalog and was Vassar's initial step in this
direction. |
| Directory Datamart |
[Reed] While working on the creation of content management
solutions for campus directories and department web pages, it became
apparent that a datamart of “person” information would
be a critical component. Reed is now in the final stages of developing
such a datamart––fondly referred to as Reedco––in
order to pull together all the authoritative information about students,
faculty, staff and alumni, from a variety of different databases.
Reedco will provide person information
for applications such as print and web directories, department web
pages, the academic catalog, email routing, and user account management. |
| Employee Sick
& Vacation time Reporting |
[Swarthmore] This page allows a supervisor or other
designated staff member to record sick and vacation time use. Fields
are provided for the hours and days of sick and vacation time used
each month. Once the data is entered, a copy of the record is sent
automatically to Human Resources, the employee's supervisor, the staff
member entering the report (if other than the supervisor), and the
employee. |
| Faculty Staffing
Plans |
[Vassar] A web database for faculty staffing that
is used to plan course offerings and faculty staffing requirements
for the following academic year. Development of the system began in
March 2004 and the utility is currently being rolled out. An associated
budgetary component that will be used by the Dean's Office is still
under development. |
| Grade Submission |
[Reed/Occidental] In 2003, Reed and Occidental
undertook co-development and application sharing of a web-based grade
submission module. The software was put into full production in May
2003. Grade submission at Reed works with an existing information
gateway, enabling faculty to look up course lists and other
student information. Starting from their list of courses, faculty
can review a student's mid-term grade and submit their final grade
for the course. Faculty may also submit written comments, which are
required for all unsatisfactory grades.
From February to May of 2004, Reed provided release time for one of
its web developers to work on Occidental's behalf in order to port
the grade submission module to their environment. A number of changes
were made to make the application adhere to Occidental's grading practices
and to enable faculty to save and review partially completed grades
and comments throughout the grading period. Some of these improvements
are likely to be incorporated into Reed's version of the software
as well. |
| Student Employment |
[Vassar] This system, which enables students to register
online for campus employment, was implemented in March 2003 and enhanced
in 2004. It includes job registration for entering freshmen and e-postcard
notification of job assignments. Students can elect to return to their
previous position or rank their preferences for the upcoming year.
An algorithm was developed to assign jobs based upon class year and
financial aid status. |
| Student Information
for Faculty |
[Occidental] Faculty can now access lists of students
in their classes, their advisees and students in a major or minor.
These routines were developed in collaboration with Reed. Occidental
also implemented a system that allows faculty to check the progress
of their advisees in meeting their core requirements. Building on
experience gained by collaborating with the WISP schools, Occidental
built a datamart for this application, which improved its performance
dramatically. |
| Student Information
for Students |
[Occidental] This system allows students to access
their grades the same day they are posted into the Registrar's system.
Occidental has since added web based address and emergency contact
information updates and a clearance system for students. |
| Student Locater/Student
Pictures |
[Swarthmore] This utility, written in Java, accepts
a unique person identifier and passes the person's picture back to
the requesting page. The desire to add pictures of faculty, staff
and students to web pages is likely to grow over time and this web
utility can be used for any page with only minor adjustments. It is
currently used for student pictures but the database contains pictures
of everyone who has been issued and ID card by the college. |
| Voting System |
[Occidental] Faculty and alumni voting systems
were discussed at the very first WISP meeting in Chicago. Differences
in voting procedures among the four schools suggested that joint design
might be difficult but information was shared nonetheless. Occidental
took advantage of WISP discussions and the expertise acquired through
other web projects to develop its voting system in 2003. This system
is now in use for both faculty and alumni organization elections.
[Vassar] Like Occidental, Vassar implemented a web-based Faculty Voting
system to elect faculty members to committees defined within the faculty
governance. The system was designed to accommodate standard elections
as well as special elections, such as the search for the Dean of the
College. Eligibility and tenure information is fed directly from the
Banner system. Voting system functionality includes member nominations,
candidate generation and acceptance, balloting and voting algorithms.
The system was implemented in February 2003. |
| Web Authentication |
[Occidental] Occidental developed a web authentication
system to facilitate single sign-on.
The design was largely influenced by discussions at WISP meetings.
Occidental now uses the same directory service for all network login,
email, web based applications, and several web applications hosted
remotely by vendors. They also designed and built a sophisticated
emulator to facilitate testing of web application authentication.
The system design was shared with the other WISP schools as part of
a discussion on LDAP and directory services. While each schools uses
a different underlying directory strategy, the design information
has proven to be valuable to all.
[Swarthmore] Swarthmore Authentication Service
is a utility, developed in Python, which allows third party applications
to validate accounts against their Banner database. Without requiring
authenticated access to their Oracle database, an application can
submit an ID and affiliation code to receive an XML-formatted validation.
This is a secure utility, accessible only by web applications that
are registered with their IT organization and that pass proper credentials
across a secure connection. |
| Web Survey Tools
|
[Swarthmore] This tool was developed as a proof-of-concept
Python web application in 2002. It
was developed and continues to operate as a general use application
enabling any web form to submit data to a MySQL
database table. Interfaces exist that allow a user to register a form
and receive a unique identifier and password with which to access
the collected data. After a form is configured, submissions are automatically
deposited in a database by means of a CGI script. When data collection
is complete, the dataset can be downloaded into various applications
for analysis. |
