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.