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.

from the CARET library

We've been playing with our new Flip video camera recently, and this is an introduction to the e-admin project, which we recorded last week. A rather medicre example - we got better after recording this one, when we learnt to start the Flip a little while before we began talking. Oops! Still, this should give you some idea of what we are working on.

Welcome!

This project kicked off in October 2008. It is the idea of Dr Richard Prager, at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Rachael Padman, at the Physics Department.

Dr. Laura James will be managing the project from CARET, and initially Dr. William Billingsley will be working on researching the requirements for modular tools, based in CARET.

We hired Matthew Jones, who will be working on the Engineering Department side, and are looking for additional people at the moment.

Laura, Richard and Rachael attended the JISC "Institutional Innovation" programme meeting earlier in October and are looking forward to getting the project underway.