Developing Simple Software

These are the principles we used to guide our development of software which would be deployed and maintained locally in university departments by non-professional programmers, such as computer officers, competent academics, even summer students. We are planning to also publish them as a white paper companion piece to the e-Admin project's final report.
Appropriate to the task
Software involving workflow through numerous or systems or users, especially complex ones or those outside the maintainer’s sphere of influence, is inherently unlikely to be ‘simple’. Similarly for software which must be used by many different users, or which involves high-stakes or confidential operations.
No external libraries
Libraries are ‘black boxes’ for those unfamiliar with them and make it more difficult to build a mental model of the software. Application frameworks are bad for the same reason - they might be great for professional programmers, but they introduce a huge amount of noise for novices. External libraries get updated, maintained and retired, adding work for the diligent application maintainer, especially if they are popular targets for security hacks.
This rule is flexible, within reason - sometimes a library or API might be the only reasonable way of achieving something, Shibboleth login for instance, but the impact on the maintainer but always weigh heavy in the balance.
No abstractions
Abstractions are usually introduced to promote code re-use and support configuration for different users. Even if well explained and documented, they make it harder for someone unfamiliar with a program to understand how it works. Lots of ‘big’ projects are actually small, once all the abstraction and configuration capability needed to handle different user requirements is stripped out.
Novice-friendly
Professional software developers will want to apply their ideas about best practice, appropriate tools, and software architecture. All this draws on considerable background knowledge and context, without which none of these things makes much sense. Put best practices to one side and consider the novice user. How would someone whose background consists of “PHP in 24 hours” approach the problem?
The code is the configuration
Don’t try too hard to bring all possible configuration parameters into one place. Parameters such as text labels clearly benefit from extraction, but creating configuration abilities beyond that basic level requires increasing abstraction and alternative execution paths in the code, placing a larger barrier in the path of subsequent maintainers and developers, and risking the counterproductive situation where understanding the configuration language is as difficult as understanding source code.
Users know what they’re doing
I.E., users have a reasonable mental model of the process and data structures. The tool should support that mental model, and not attempt to second-guess or restrict their actions.
For example instead of enforcing strict referential integrity, TODB provides operations that assist the user in locating anomalies, e.g. a query that lists all jobs allocated to people who are not found in the database6. In a typical database scenario it would not be possible to allocate a job to a non-existent person, but this is possible on paper, and in the mind of the teaching administrator, so that to impose such a restriction in the software would only interfere with their working and thinking process.

tasty outcomes

Yesterday, the project team met to complete our programme evaluation. In our discussions, we summarised the outcomes of the project:

• two examples of a prototype user-generated software system providing a requirements definition or specification for use in further work
• provided a model of how simple software development principles can provide a system which non-specialists can deploy and maintain
• an example of a sustainable development model, where non-technical end users can maintain and modify their own software
• an example of how experimental software development, merely by happening, can catalyse institutional change in policy and process; the software development may not be part of the eventual solution, but if the original need is met by other processes/systems, it is a good outcome
• we learnt that arts, social science and humanities departments often have strong technical skills!

Photo by PetitPlat by sk_ - http://flic.kr/p/52bGDC

wrapping up

The project team is currently wrapping up the final loose ends for "MEAoT". I think one thing we've learned is that acronyms can be very ugly, and it might sometimes be better to stick with a nice meaningful name!

We've had some people join us towards the end of the project, with Guy Chisholm working hard on the latest iteration of the Student Choices software, and Amyas Phillips coming in to help evaluate our work, and to check that our "client" departments had all had good experiences.

We'll be sharing our final report, and associated other reports, here shortly.

Update from the Teaching Office Database System

Here is an update on what has been achieved by the Teaching Office Database (TODB) project as it enters its final stages.

We have worked with the Engineering Department and six other Departments to develop customised versions of the Teaching Office Database (TODB) system for them. Many enhancements made along the way have been ‘retrofitted’ to systems which were visited earlier in the development cycle.

All of these 6 ‘new’ departments plan to use TODB for the next academic year and have claimed for the funding to cover their costs involved in participating in the project. Three of these now have their own copy of the software which they are running on their own servers. The other 3 are in the process of doing this. I have met with or arranged to meet with the Computer Officers from each department to make sure they feel confident to host and support the system. A mailing list for these computer officers will be set up to facilitate interdepartmental communication about TODB queries.

A generic version of TODB, which is designed to be easily customised, has been developed and will be released under an Open Source Licence. Accompanying documentation will shortly be evaluated by an independent member of CARET. This includes a User Guide which is linked to a Help button in the application, an Installation and Configuration Guide, a Developer’s Guide and a ‘How To’ Guide intended to point to the solutions to normal requests and queries.

We have recently had an enquiry from a new department who are interested in adopting the system. They have seen the generic system and feel that they will be able to take this ‘off-the-shelf’. This would seem to be verification that this process has produced a useful and tuneable product.

Institutional Innovation Exchange

We all went out to Aston, on the little pond's shore line
To trade products with some tokens, we didn't have much time
Lawrie Phipps and the support team found the best place around
With lots of coffee, food and good wine, we sold our stuff by the pound
Talks on the water
and products in the sky

----------------

The "trade fair" in Aston University was an interesting event, allowing us to gauge interest in our "products" for the first time. Ours did not sell much, but we prefer to think of it as a niche product, suitable for the more discerning academic customer. We did get interesting comments, though, and we learned from this experiment.

The JISC organisation of the event was flawless. We had very nice accommodation, decent food and lots of free caffeine. We couldn't really ask for more. The support team did its best to encourage us out of our shells and to present our projects to the "general" public.

--------------

We're all going to Aston...

Avi Naim and Guy Chisholm will be off to the JISC Institutional Innovation programme meeting in Aston next week. Watch this space for the "outputs" we'll have for sale in the Trade Fair!

Modular e-Administration of Teaching: Assembly Report

The Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) in Cambridge University hosted a JISC assembly for the Modular e-Administration of Teaching (MEAoT) project on Thursday, 10 December 2009.

The list of participants included:

Richard Prager, MEAoT project PI, Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED)
Laura James, CARET
Anne Clarke, MEAoT project, CARET and CUED
Guy Chisholm, MEAoT project, CARET
Avi Naim, MEAoT project, CARET
Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, JISC BRII project, Oxford University
Bridget Taylor, DAISY project, Oxford University
Jenny Mackness, JISC liaison for MEAoT
Rachel Tuley, Teaching Administrator, CUED
Jen Pollard, Computer Officer, Cambridge University English Department
Carmen Neagoe, Teaching Administrator, Cambridge University Judge Business School
Helen Marshall, Teaching Administrator, Cambridge University Physics Department
David Goode, Computer Officer, Cambridge University, Department of Divinity

The programme was designed to make the meeting a pleasant event. It started with a historical overview of the project (by Prof. Prager). This was immediately followed by lunch at a nearby restaurant, which helped break the ice and make everybody more comfortable.

We then had five short presentations (15 minutes or less each). Three of these were by MEAoT staff (Prof. Prager, Anne Clarke and Avi Naim) and explained aspects of the project. The other two were by our guests from Oxford: Dr. Loureiro-Koechlin gave an overview of the BRII project and explained how it approaches potential customers. Dr. Taylor described the large scale DAISY project in the social Sciences division of Oxford University.

A coffee break allowed free discussion between the participants and led naturally to the round table discussion of software distribution models. The forum was not very large but it was particularly varied, and this allowed us to get several different perspectives.

We were discussing four approaches to distributing software, each the result of particular circumstances:

1. The Teaching Office Database (TODB) of CUED is the first part of the MEAoT project. It was conceived as a light-weight solution to the particular problem of allocating teaching duties fairly to members of staff. It was deliberately designed as an independent software, without any connection to other systems. In order to distribute it to other departments effort was invested in customization, with the explicit intention of the departments adopting the code and assuming full ownership of it from that point onwards. So far seven departments at Cambridge have received a customized version, and a generic version of the code is also available for other interested parties at future times, when the project team will no longer be available to customize the code for their specific needs.
2. The examination entries module for the Cambridge Physics Department is the second part of MEAoT. Unlike the TODB this module is required to integrate with a preexisting Teaching Information System (TIS) in Physics. The module is under development currently. Future adoption by other departments will crucially depend on the ability to make the TIS more generic, because it will be impossible for other departments to take the exam entries module on its own. Therefore in this case distribution of the software depends on making it more generic, not more specific as in the case of the TODB.
3. The BRII project collates data from various resources in order to create a searchable repository of knowledge for researchers. While the underlying software is monolithic, the various users around Oxford university need to interact with it in many different ways. Here the distribution of the code depends on separating a generic piece of code that works directly with a database (the back-end) from user-customized interfaces (the front-end).
4. The DAISY project creates a wide reaching system of internal administration within the Social Sciences Division at Oxford. It is developed as a large, monolithic system. The distribution of this software relies mostly on its provision of crucial services for costing activities. The fact that the various departments need these services makes them much more willing to accept a single large central system.
   

We attempted to understand how these distribution models work and what conclusions could be drawn from them for future projects. It was clearly stated by a computer officer (Jen Pollard) that she can see the benefit in adopting (and further adapting) the TODB software to the needs of her department. The other computer officer present (David Goode) agreed. The administrators raised the issue of having to "sell" such systems to their academic staff. Their ability to do so relied equally on the functionality provided by the system and its look and feel.
Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin emphasized the point that the belief of each of her customers that they are getting something customized to their specific needs was the single most important "selling point" of the BRII software. This point was echoed by Richard Prager in viewing his experience of developing the initial version of TODB. Bridget Taylor talked about the provision of costing services as the "hook" with which to gain acceptance for the whole of the DAISY project across the division.

The term "centralized system" is universally unpopular and should therefore be avoided when introducing new software in the academic arena, even if the software is in fact monolithic and centralized. The clear hurdle that should be overcome is the unwillingness of the users to try it out. Considerable effort must be put into working with the intended users in order to make them feel that they want to "own" the software. The willingness of TODB staff (Matthew and Anne) to work with the various departments, listen to their needs and change the software to suit them was mentioned as the best aspect of TODB, and the thing that set it apart from other software projects. The ability of Dr. Loureiro-Koechlin to "hide" the central aspects of the BRII system behind user-customized front-ends helped her in persuading reluctant users to try it out. Even the accepted centralized system of the DAISY project benefits from being characterized as "Divisional" rather than "University Wide".

It was therefore expressed in several different ways that the most important aspect of getting new software accepted is the feeling of the intended customers that they are getting something that was prepared especially for them. Those functionalities of the system that serve a particular customer best should be emphasized over other functionalities (even if these happen to be more important to the system as a whole), and the look and feel of the system should be tailored to make the user comfortable with it (even if this means generating several different user interfaces for the same underlying software).

The conclusion is that "customer-friendly" measures should be incorporated into the planning of software projects and allocated sufficient time and resources. The success of the project as a whole may depend of such measures.

TODB has new Team Member

TODB has new Team Member

Hi, I’m Anne Clarke and I have taken over from (couldn’t attempt to replace) Matthew Jones on the TODB Project. I have had a varied career in IT which included working in a baby clothes warehouse near New York, some time in Coutts Bank and working on Stock Exchange feeds for Reuters. I am now back in Cambridge where I took my first degree so am familiar with the academic system here.

It was good to get a chance to ‘meet’ people from both JISC and other JISC projects during the Elluminate Shaping Change session yesterday.

I have been reflecting on some of the points that Steve Outram made about managing effective change in his introduction and how they were later illustrated during later sessions:

• Support of Senior Management

Pretty much goes without saying but helps to gain the necessary staff commitment such as that needed for the steering committee used by the e-Assessment Project.

• Early Engagement

The Erewhon project choose to demonstrate an early working version to overcome resistence. During the afternoon session we discussed that it was important to engage all who would be affected as early as possible.

This has been highlighted in my own project, TODB, where the staff who use the system to enter data have given valuable input into what would work best for them.

• Sell Benefits

The ECCILES project used a visit to a power station to show those who would be impacted by their project the importance of saving energy. The TAG project encouraged student involvement in their project by showing them that this would improve their employability.

E-Assessment and ASSET both talked about starting small (1 faculty or a pilot) which allowed them to get things right before rolling out to other departments. Again this is something we have been able to do on the TODB project where we have started with a working application developed for one department that we can demonstrate to others to show the benefits.

• Support Risk Taking

Innovative projects by their nature involve risk and funding from JISC can be used as a way of mitigating this risk.

Throughout the day, there was emphasis on the final outputs of our projects. The format of the final report does need to comply with JISC standards for auditing purposes but it is important to also produce a package that allows the benefits of the project to be realised elsewhere. Lawrie Phipps suggested the use of magazines and podcasts such as used by http://magazine.openhabitat.org/page/open-habitat-magazine. Ruth Drysdale said that the commenting on the learning from things you have not been able to accomplish were as valuable as your successes.

Thank you to everyone involved in such an interesting day.

TODB running locally in English Faculty

We have achieved a small, but I think significant, milestone in the TODB adoption process: the English Faculty have now set up TODB on one of their servers. Their entirely independently-hosted TODB is accessible here: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/todb/

Installation took approximately 20 minutes and went without hitch on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), which was already running Apache, MySQL and PHP. The installation consisted of five steps:
1 - database creation
2 - database user setup (via script)
3 - database table/data setup (via script)
4 - installation of PHP files (tar file tree)
5 - apache setup (manual copy & paste & edit from conf file excerpt provided with distribution)

Most reassuring was the fact that it ran 'out of the box' on a pretty standard web server.

Exam Entries Demo Report

The initial specification of the examination entries module was based on discussions with the physics department of Cambridge University. However, it is difficult for potential future users of this module to imagine what it will look like in reality and so important points may be missed.

In order to make it more tangible we prepared a Java-based demo and took it to the physics department. It emulates linking to a wider student information system and allows a student to log in and register for exams. These registrations are then checked against a list of registration rules, which are encoded into the system in a generic way. Once they pass this validation they are sent to the student's Director of Studies for approval.

A separate tool was demonstrated that allows members of staff in the department to change, remove and add new rules. It was demonstrated that this simple system is capable of covering most of the needs of the physics department with regard to examination registrations.

The feedback from Physics was enthusiastic and valuable advice was given on points that were not covered yet or were covered in an incomplete way. The full specification of the system will now be reviewed and improved, to be followed by a pilot module that will be deployed in Physics towards the end of the year.

Based on the comments received we are very encouraged and believe that other departments will also be interested in the pilot module, once it is available.

Teaching allocation similarity map

After setting up, configuring and customising TODB instances for several departments, I am struck by the unexpected similarities between certain departments. It seems that the administration of teaching does not follow disciplines. I constructed a rough map of similarity, which is inserted below. The features common to all TODBs are not listed; only the specific overlaps between departments (Chemistry is omitted but will be added soon!).

Departmental Deployments

The TODB is 'under deployment' in the following departments:

• Engineering
• Judge Business School
• Chemistry
• English
• Divinity
• Veterinary Medicine

Engineering and the Judge are the most established users. Although our engagement with Veterinary Medicine began in December, for various reasons it has not been until very recently (this week!) that their TODB is now online. At the request of the Vet School a rudimentary timetable output system has been developed for TODB. This allows jobs data to be presented in timetable format if the 'timeslots' column is present on the jobs table and timeslot information is provided in a format something like 'Week x: Day time, ...'; e.g. 'Week1 Tu.11.30, Wk2 W.3' and so on. This has been designed to be reasonably robust.

The Divinity site is also under development. A slightly different timetable approach is being developed for them, where we are attempting to generate output in a form compatible with the Cambridge Reporter. If this can be developed, it will save a huge amount of time for Divinity and staff of other departments who have adopted the TODB system.

As each department is set up and as their particular needs are supported, a generic version of TODB is being developed on a parallel track. This is nearly ready for release - hopefully in the next week or two. As this is intended to be a formal release, it will include documentation, installation software and administrative tools. More on this soon!

MEAoT at the BRII Oxford Assembly

Matthew Jones attended the BRII Assembly in Oxford on 9 June 2009. Access his full report - as published in the JISC-SSBR newsletter on 2 August 2009 - here: http://assemblies.inin.jisc-ssbr.net/2009/07/27/meaot-brii-assembly/

JISC SSBR Elluminate Meeting 9 July 2009

Notes from the JISC Elluminate all-day meeting 09 July 09: Support, Synthesis
and Benefits Realization, for the Institutional Innovation and Life Long
Learning / Work Force Development programs.

General:
The meeting took most of the day and for the most part proceeded at a comfortable pace. My impression is that this is a viable way of conducting low-cost meetings.

The technical side of the meeting was generally alright, although there were
some glitches with sound. Of the 80-odd participants less than 10 chose to
activate their web cams at any moment and most stayed silent for the whole
day. The breakout groups were divided seamlessly, although they were brought
back together rather abruptly due to lack of experience on the part of moderators.

Morning sessions:
In the first morning session John Cook gave a presentation entitled
"Scaffolding the mobile Wave". His assertion was that new digital media (e.g.,
the mobile phone) can be regarded as cultural resources for learning. The
question he posed was how to bring together informal learning contexts in the
wide world with practices that are valued inside institutions. This must be
done with awareness to the critics who claim that social software and search
engines do not encourage collaborative work.

JISC set a target for 2010 of widespread user-owned technology in learning,
but this is now acknowledged as unlikely. It is a fact that over half of the
world's population owns a personal mobile phone. Nevertheless, Cook quoted
research by Davidson and Goldberg who indicate that while learners use and
adapt to changing technology, the act of teaching remains largely
unchanged. What people tend to use their mobiles for is at best informal
learning, e.g., watching UTube clips on a mobile. This does not replace the
type of learning we do in formal education.

Cook suggests using technology positively by scaffolding the learning, meaning
one more able learner helping a newcomer. "Google wave" is a hosted
conversation that lives in one place (like a live twitter). Some licensing and
privacy issues still need resolving.

Two examples were given of courses using this technology in London: mobile
urban education and mobile cistercian abbeys. In both cases the students could
get information on site thanks to GPS locators, that enhanced their
understanding of the topic. The first example examines urban planning: as you
walk about you get feeds of historical pictures of the area. Schools, for
example, used to look like factories or prisons, becoming flatter in the 60's,
more "humane". When you stand in the street you get images of processions from
the 1930's. Students work in pairs. The second example concerns Cistercian
Abbeys, construction of which started in 1132. A mobile tour was developed
that shows a full structure as it once stood suprimposed on the existing
ruins. between 80% and 90% of students like it.
The big question is how do we go beyond it.

Cook's vision goes beyond the usage of static, pre-defined information. He
would like to see learners "appropriate the mobile wave", e.g., using it for
time tabling, receiving alerts of room changes for lectures, locating fellow
students in their study set, etc. An example is the Contsens project (http://tinyurl.com/klvx6j).

The discussion that follwed concentrated on technological aspects of Google
Wave and on cost. It was also pointed out that there is a divide between
higher education, where such material supports the more traditional teaching
materials, and further education, where this type of material may be the
backbone of a course.


The second morning session was dedicated to Institutional Innovations projects
reporting back from assemblies.

1. The BRII assembly on stakeholder engagement was held in Oxford. Six projects
participated, each giving a short presentation, and in addition a guest
speaker was invited: the head of internal communications at Oxford, Susannah
Wintersgill. After the guest talk and presentations there were several
breakout groups for discussing various aspects of stakeholder engagement.

The overall feeling was that the assembly worked well and since each proejct
faced different stakeholder problems, each came up with a unique solution as
well. This is all summed up on the BRII project blog. They feel that the
results of the discussions could be taken forward, perhaps for Benefits
Realization.

2. Data Centre Exchange Assembly - hosted by University of East Anglia
The participating projects shared information on what has been done so far and
then split up to breakout groups. A successful meeting where each project
could learn from the other.

3. weCAMP and i-Borrow Assembly
i-Borrow is about a large number of netbooks with location tracking data.
weCAMP deliver a 3-d package of learning on campus.
The feeling is that there was scope for cooperation between the project as
each was more advanced in one common area and a little behind in another.

4. Academic Networks: Laura briefly described the upcoming assembly.


We then had a general presentation about Synthesizing the programme.
- The strategic environment is complex.
- The context of institutional innovation is wider than the physical location of the university, it is about commonly conected activities that pervade many institutions.
- universities can see themselves as global change agents, or an institutional improvement facilitator, for businesses, NGOs, other universities and government agencies.

Data collection from phase 2 projects:
- create a 3d "matrix" featuring the projects, the bottom up emergent themes from them and the top-down themes from JISC and HEFCE. Looking for common themes.
- bottom up themes are derived from popular key words.
- elicited themes: open educational dialogue, ...
- top down themes: learning, teaching and assessment; research and development; business and community engagement; learning resources, e-Admin,...

- LLL/WFD projects started 13 April and since then the team has been collecting key words and themes.
- analysed with wordle (www.wordle.net).
- many areas where projects can support each other.
- challenge: making the model practical, defining a scope for the innovation programme.


Afternoon Sessions:
After lunch we split into breakout groups. At 2:30 we were all
brought back (rather abruptly) into the main room for concluding comments by
George Roberts and the meeting formally ended at 3pm. Several workshops
followed after the official end of the meeting.

Breakout group 3: Tech practices
The general feeling was that this group had very little time to discuss a lot
of questions. The questions are brought below, but there was almost no
discussion due to time pressure.
1. Where is the buy in?
- Is your project about technology, practice or innovation?
- Are you planning change or replacement?
- Who initiates change?
- Where are you embedding? e.g. financial systems, staff practice (takes time)
- How do you rate your institution’s ability to change? This may depend on the nature of the institution - devolved or centralized - and its’ ethos.
- Change agents - who drives change? Are you targeting the correct stakeholders?

It was suggested to approach stake holders in a "divide and conquer" manner:
get senior people in or at least people who can nag them, and through them get
a wedge into the organisation and promote your targets. Another comment was
that change is seen as a managerial activity in the UK while in Spain and
Portugal (for example) it is seen more as a student-driven modification to
institution culture.

2. When does embedding work?
- How are you getting buy-in? Sell the argument - give the tools for the need to change to be passed on
- How have you planned for user engagement: user and provider
- Are you embedding solutions, not enhancements?
- Can you create patronage?
- Do you have a user-friendly presentation?
- Can you leverage institutional reputation - what are the competitors using?

3. What are the drivers for embracing technology?
- Are you addressing students and incoming staff?
- Have you taken into account relevant institutional strategic agendas?
- Will your results be credible?
- Do you have access to technology-wise institutional managers?
- Can you argue that risky times call for risky solutions?
- Do you know you key change agents - they will be the implementers? Or are you depending on middle managers when you should be going more senior – e.g. see it as staff development.

4. How do I convince my stakeholders?
- What is your strapline?
- Are you solving non-existent problems? Do you have a good definition of the problems you are solving?
- Why would I support you?
- What problem do you solve for you me?
- What do managers want to hear - the management discourse? This is not the same as Web2.0 discourse.


Workshop: Second Life
This short workshop introduced the concept and basics of Second Life. It is
clear that some people will find it an entertaining environment, and learning
could take place in groups that are physically separated, but it is not clear
how significant a component this can be as part of the studies towards an
academic goal, such as completing a course on time.

Progressing with TODB deployments

The Engineering department Teaching Office Database (TODB) has been deployed in the past month to the Judge Business School (JBS). This was a natural first deployment since JBS and Engineering share lecturers and students from each department tend to take some courses in the other. This was also a test case for the suitability of the TODB to a different environment than the one in which it was created (Engineering).

Initial feedback from JBS is very positive. The local team has asked for several minor modifications, which were put in place by Matthew Jones who also deployed the system to JBS. Apart from those the TODB was taken as is and already proves useful to JBS.

Encouraged by a first successful deployment we now plan to deploy in other participating departments. First up will be the department of English. They are much smaller than engineering and consequently staff do not belong to specific divisions within the department and can teach almost any course. They also allow lecture courses to belong to more than one degree path. These are new challenges for the TODB and will serve to further test its suitability to various environments. We expect feedback by the end of April 2009.

Further deployments are planned in the departments of Chemistry and Divinity in May 2009. The latter is of a particular interest because they have no programmers locally and will not be able to modify the system they get in the future. They are therefore more likely to want "future proofing" and this may lead to new requirements.

The hope is that the feedback collected by June 2009 will be sufficient for us to generalize the TODB schema and build an access API to the database that will serve future developments well.

The examination entries module, to be developed by the Physis department, will benefit from ground-work laid down by the deployments of the TODB. The examination entries schema and database API will be built in accordance with those of the generalized TODB and will therefore become a first test case for it. In order to achieve this it is important to have both systems in the same place, and therefore it is only natural to deploy the TODB in Physics around June 2009. Feedback from Physics, which is a large departments with many inter-departmental courses, will inform the process of generalizing the TODB even further and at the same time give us the basis on which to develop the examination entries module.

Our expectation is to have a proper design for both modules by July 2009 and move into development immediately after this milestone.

Thoughts about modularity

The Engineering and Physics departments provide us with a unique set up in which to design a modular system. Engineering has a working module to manage teaching duty allocations (Teaching Office DataBase). This module is being rolled out to the Judge Business School these days. There are some differences between the version rolled out to JBS and the original system, but crucially only one minor change at database level. This allows us to think of the Engineering module as the nucleus of a larger system, and of the JBS roll-out as the most basic extension to this module. Further deployments into other departments in the univeristy will test the suitability of this module and the degree to which its robust, simple design is sufficient to meet their needs. The challenge here is organise the code and the database schema so as to allow other modules to be added to it while maintaining it design. We might add tables to the database but will aim not to change existing ones.

The Physics department's Teaching Information System is larger and more complex, and will be redesigned as a whole. The first module to be written there will be the second deliverable of the eAdmin project, managing student registrations for courses and examinations. The challenge in this case is to incorporate the Engineering TODB within this new system as is, while developing the second module around it. This will serve as a more serious test for the modularity of the emerging system.

If we can demonstrate that the new system lends itself to the above two types of modular extension we will have achieved a lot. Proper documentation will then pave the way for future extensions of the same modular nature.

TODB at the Judge Business School

The Judge Business School (JBS) at the University of Cambridge has been associated with the Engineering TODB for some time, and is one of the cooperating departments in this project. The JBS currently uses an Excel-spreadsheet based teaching allocation system. An interesting challenge has been translating this into something the TODB can handle without fundamental changes. It is with satisfaction that we are able to report that effectively every peice of information stored in the spreadsheet can be stored in the TODB without modification to the database schema, with the one small exception of adding a field for 'points quotas'. User interface code is similar, except where support for using quotas is necessary.

Two new reports were developed and added to the TODB for the JBS:

• A teaching points summary page, which lists point-sums in categories for teaching, supervision, sabbatical and so on by subject division and by course.
  
• An interactive faculty (staff) summary page which displays how many points each member of staff is 'earning' and how this is broken down by teaching activity.
  

These reports replicate almost exactly the function and behaviour of the spreadsheet equivalents on which they are based.

As the JBS version of the TODB has been developed in parallel with the Engineering TODB, it is effectively using TODB v1 code, where Engineering is now using TODB v1.1 code. It is necessary to attempt to converge these as much as possible prior to evaluation and use by the JBS.

To web2 or not to web2

On the e-admin project we're developing web-based tools to support teaching activity. We don't normally call these Web1 tools, or Web2 tools, but ultimately the modules we are creating are an emerging kind of technology. And perhaps with actual academics feeding information into these systems, they could count as "user generated content", and therefore Web2.0?

Netskills are looking for information on how researchers, academics, and the people who support their work use emerging tools, such as Web2.0 services like twitter, flickr and more. This is part of work funded by the JISC Users and Innovation (U&I) programme.

Please help them out by taking their survey!

They will use information from the survey to create guides to help others see how emerging technologies can help in research and teaching.

Updates to the Engineering TOD software

Various new features have been added to the Engineering TOD software package. It is hoped that these features will allow more effective and easier use of the software.

Today is something of a milestone, because it is the first day that the new 'version' of the software (unofficially v1.1) is to be used in as part of the real teaching allocation process in the Engineering department. The particular new features used today are:

• Formula-based points calculation
• Entry of student counts per teaching unit to support points calculations
• Modified and Printable version of the Jobs/units view

In addition to these features, the following features are now available:

• More reliable and consistent CSV downloads of data
• Autocompletion of person names in the job editing screen
• Display of points formulae in Job-, Unit- and People-viewing/editing screens

Various other new features and improvements are in the process of completion, or in the pipeline for the near future.

These new features are being piloted in the Engineering department, but will soon be migrated to other departments (the next being the Judge Business School). It is hoped that by adding these features to a live and used software package, very valuable richer 'real life' feedback and commentry will become available to feed into the software requirements set for the Teaching Allocation Module.

The Engineering TODB software

The Cambridge University Engineering department has been using a software package developed in-house by Prof Richard Prager for managing teaching allocations. This software is known as the 'Teaching Office Database', abbreviated as 'TODB' or 'TOD'.

This software forms the basis of a usable prototype to demonstrate and evaluate much of the functionality envisaged in the Teaching Allocation module, which is a major deliverable in this project. Various additions and modifications have been and will be made to the TODB software. This software is used by the Engineering department, as well as the Judge Business School.

The CARET project team have approached several other departments at Cambridge University who have expressed an interest in becoming involved with this project. These departments will be using the TOD software initially, appropriately configured for their needs, for their teaching allocation operations in 2009, or will at least 'mirror' their existing processes with the TOD software. The intention is that all the departments using the software will be able to comment more positively and more usefully on features and usability if they have something to work with, rather than simply postulating about hypothetical software. Feedback from the use of the software will then be aggregated and analysed and will form the foundation of a requirements document for the Teaching Allocation Module. Some of the software elements may also be used directly.