I plan to analyze GWeb, specifically the class registration application, and its
ID: 3802121 • Letter: I
Question
I plan to analyze GWeb, specifically the class registration application, and its critical business and technical problems. We hope to address the issues of customer dissatisfaction, lack of efficiency, and lack of a usable interactive interface. These general issues affect both GW administration, professors, and the students. Some consequences of the GWeb inefficiencies have been the lack of instructions and facility in use, a discrepancy between online and offline registration, inability to differentiate between “standing” and “year”, and a lack of time to truly think about scheduling, which can cause more conflicts. Additionally, GWeb does. not recognize certain classes as requirements and lacks a method of prioritization for students who may have limited course flexibility. For the professors, the GWeb inefficiency diminishes their understanding for the popularity of a class, creates issues for overflow or empty classes, and burdens them with helping students adjust to the class when those students faced registration delays and joined the class late. Professors also cannot accurately gauge interest for a class, due to the lack of transparency involving the waitlist. This also affects students, since they are unable to know where on the waitlist they have been placed. In addition, the current interface makes registration a speed race, giving priority to those who either type the fastest or have the smallest schedules. This can create unfair disadvantages for those students who have less flexibility in their schedules. On another note, it is difficult to look up alternative classes, thus forcing students to spend a long time searching for replacement classes, risking the possibility for those alternates to be quickly filled.
Even further, all of these factors affect the GWU administration. The backlog of students creates a great deal of managerial and paper traffic, especially since most of the issues must be dealt with on a case by case basis. The ultimate results of these issues are inefficiency, dissatisfaction, delays, and frustration. However, just as GWeb was designed to ease the class registration process, we believe that the process could be eased even further through IT. Our team looks forward to creating a proposal that focuses on using information technology to improve GWeb, and thus streamlining the administrative process and facilitating the creation of schedules with minimal conflict.
====================================================
What type of information technologies are required and why?
Find a list of IT components and systems for solution (e.g Hardware, Software, database, network, and people)
Explanation / Answer
A complete classroom management website can be designed which will help you to understand various issues separately. It will overcome your problems of inefficiency, dissatisfaction, delay and frustation. It will also help you with managing classes properly and priortize students with less flexibity in their schedule.
List down all your issues into 3 categories:
> Professor's issues
> Students issues
> Other issues
This website (say GWebClass.edu) will help you sorting all your problems,
1. Display the schedule on the website
- Date
- Time
- Duration
- Course Name
- Professor Name
- Maxiumum Strength of class
2. Allow a e-form on the website for an online class registration, this e-form will have all required information to be filled by student like name, course and other details. Also, their will be list of multiple choice questions to be filled by students while registering for a course. Example of multiple choice questions:
Have you ever attended the course. Options - Yes or No
What is the urgency of course - High/Medium/Low
Each multiple choice question's answer will have some weight assigned to it and based on all the answer's the Priority of the Student can be defined. This will be helpful for students with less flexibility.
Also, on the website while filling the registration form you can ask the student if seat not allotted in the current class which next class will he/she be able to take, and provide them with list of alternate classes. This will also help provide a waitlist to students and each student will be provided a waitlist number which will be send to him/her via message or email and can we used in upcoming/alternative classes.
3. Students to fill a feedback form(MCQ's) after every class to rate their takeaway from the class. This is help in maintaining the popularity of the professor.
Point 1-3 will be taken care by a Software professional. Do define him all your requirements so that he can design the best suited website for you.
Software -
.Net/Java/etc on which website will be build
A domain for your website
Hardware - a server to host your website
Database - Oracle Database /MS Access/ Microsoft SQL Server
6 tables(Professors, Students, Courses, Admin People, Books/Notes/Lectures, Classroom details)
People -
Software Engineer to maintain and code your website.
Database Administrator
Admin Team
Data Operator
Ultimate Results will be enhanced interest of students and professors, No delay and frustation, proper queue management. Notes/Data/Books on the online library can help students to access the lessons anytime for revision. Online mockup tests can be an add on before final assessments.