Back

Meeting Reports
e-Portfolio Project of CCIS
Mar. 29rd, 2004   Advisory Committee Meeting

Agenda:
CCIS presentation
Biology presentation
Discussion/Suggestions from committee

Biology :


Mar. 23rd, 2004
In our group meeting, we discussed the feedbacks from the volunteers students, and what we need to do for the next few weeks.
1. Based on studnets' portoflios, collect information of students' input in the system, organize them to help to design the database.
2. Connect coops with skills. Actually not only coops, but also professional practices.
3. Mark have a concern that if we should organize the coop category as coops one by one, or project one by one.
4. Friday 2-3pm, meet with VIera to prepare for next Monday's committee meeting. show the system online, or some snapshots. also need to write some related stuff.
5. Next Wednesday, organize these students to make schedules for next meetings.
6. System Design. This is a big topic, and we need some time to think about the system design, discuss it and refine it.
    We need a systematic approach to work on this.
     For EMPLOYERS: after an employer login, he can find two or three lists of students:  one list of students who are in coop in this employer's company; one list of studetns who share their portfolios with this company, i.e., portfolios of students who did coops in this company, one list of students who share their portfolios without any specific reasons.
    Coop DB/System DB should have some difference because of some results like grades, we don't want them to be shown to employers.

For next weeks' advisory committee meeting, I should do:
1. check web availability of the meeting place: Frost Lounge, located on the first floor of Ell Hall
2. snapshot, or organize what pages are to be shown to the committee
3.  prepare what should be explained to the committee
4.  change the organization of the portfolio to connect skills and coop more tightly
5.  dress up?

Nov. 3rd, 2003

Today,  we focus on Mark and Mingyan's reports, and have a phone talk with rsmart.

Mark talked about the organization of the portfolio. Besides "About me"(personal info about the portfolio owner) and "Permission"(share with others), there are several categories like computer skills, projects, etc.  He suggests that before clicking the category to goto its detail, there should be a summary of this category to conclude what the students has done for this category, for this skill.
Mark also talked about how to define "goal", how to define different levels of "goal", how to connect "goal" with different categories.

Viera talked about the communication with rsmart. We had a phone meeting with rsmart, talked about several general and technical problems.

Mingyan did two things in the last two weeks, built OSPI on yildun and thinked about OSPI/rsmart. About building of OSPI, I have a detailed report in my journal since it's about technical. About comparison of OSPI/rsmart.  rsmart is based on OSP, adding some customization and capabilities, e.g., customize categories and elements, change hierarchies, and configuration manager can change size, font, etc.

For security, I talked with David from system group, he said it's ok if there is no real data. and basically, I myself should work on security.  Make sure that tomcat can only access directory of portfolio, firewall, etc.

In the phone meeting with rsmart, we discussed several problems. The code does not provide the whole map of the code, if I want to modify the code, I should read and make clear the code myself. It basically does not allow me to add a new group of users, like faculty and employers. It shows that it will not easy for us to modify the code, since that will effect the interactions among different parts of the code, and if I do modify the code, it wil be difficult to combine the newer version with the modified code. Security is a big problem, I should make it work myself based on various techs.

I am wondering if we should work on the project on ourown. Like Mark said, rsmart sounds not fit our needs. Let me retest my com3315 project, then try to replace Oracle with MySQL, if these work fine, let me try to write the code instead of using OSPI. I can use it as a resource though.



Oct. 20th, 2003

In today's meeting, each of us talked about what we've done in the last three weeks.

My report includes: survey, system requirements and functionalities.
I was suggested:
1. write some scenarios about the functionalities. like faculty teaching a class wants toknow something about his students;  a student wants to query faculty
2. draw a matrix to show different elements and different levels of each elements.
3. design database better
4. explore as much as possible of what the users will
5. documentation the interaction between users and system

Lesilse talked about her survey. She found other sites are various-organized, but not very categoried.

Mark talked about his work on functionalities like levels. e.g., how many levels we should assign for each skills, and what are they.

Mel emphasized that we should have some pilot in January.


Oct. 13rd (Columbus Day)

Sep. 29th

Today we talked about many real(to me, ;) ) issues, since I think we got to do the real stuff now. Cheers.
Comparing and Choosing software package: Since OSPI focus on the students portfolios, and each student has the full control of his/her record. If the administrators want to view the records, like the portfolios of all the students, the administrator should follow some other way, instead of having the direct privileges to view the records. The only way that I can view some others' portfolios is that the owner shares some folders with me. Instead, the portfolio system of Alverno College, DDP, has such functionalities that enable administrators to view the students records actively. We will compare OSPI with other portfolio systems like DDP to make decision which we will work with and what we need to modify to fit our college's requirements.
Framework, System Requirements: This part is very important to the whole system.  It should contain various contents, about different levels of users with different priviledges, what they can do, how they interact with each other, etc.
Schedule: is important to finish the whole project.
Equipments and License: Viera is working on this closely with system group. Hopely next week, she will figure this out.
Focus group: May not gather together to discuss until Nov. or Dec.



Sep. 15th

This is the first meeting of this semester. Like other things just started, we discussed various issues.
Briefly, we talked about three kinds of problems.
The first topic is interacting with students, faculty, and employers to get the data/information needed in the project. We may invite Prof. Schneider to test on the infomation of the students in her class. Since we will need students/faculty/employers to write their document, they may have some concerns, like how much time it will cost, how detail it's required, how secure it will be, etc. All the above issues should be considered before we ask them to provide some info.
Then we discussed the technical concern. Since some portfolio systems have been used for both commercial and education purpose, we may need not develop the system by ourselves from the very beginning, we may select a suitable one from them and apply it to our case. Prof. Proulx and Mingyan will review several such software packages and choose the one we will work with. When we do the survey, there are several points should pay attention to, e.g., Will such system provides functionalities like feedback, comments, interaction, query? The other issue related is the computer used to be the server, and the availability of related software of databse, webserver, etc.
The third problem we talked about is the data/info structure. The starightforward framework contains several categories, including Theoretical foundataion, Programming skills. We should design the categories for faculty and employers. One thing should kept in mind when the info/data is collectted is that what will the infomation work for the whole system, i.e., every piece of informaiton collected will be useful. We consider that we may discuss one or two specific categories detaily in the next few meetings.


Back