Projects

Location: Not accessible

Created: October 2005

Supporting Technology: ASP.NET, MySQL

The Course Profile System is a web based application created for Education for Working Professionals (EWP), a department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that is responsible for recording and distributing course material to students all over the world. This application is modular in design whose main purpose is to maintain a current, accurate, and centralized source of information concerning the courses in production within the department. It also serves as a resource for the faculty who teach those courses. The system contains forms for them to update course information, order textbooks and request library media, inform the technical staff of the courses computing needs, and request projects from EWP.

There are five user levels in the system - faculty, staff producers, technical staff, library/bookstore, and administrator. Staff have the ability to view all important information pertaining to courses they are assigned to. Technical staff can view computing requests made by faculty and report on the status of those requests. Libraries and bookstores can view textbook and media requests that are submitted by faculty and report the status, as well as transfer ownership to other bookstores and libraries. Administrators can manage user information, create and delete courses each semester, and control every aspect of the system.

This system was initially developed as part of Managing IT Resources, a core class in the Information Technology curriculum. I worked with a team of four to go through the entire lifecycle development process - project initiation, gathering and defining requirements with the client, developing the system, and testing it. We had regular meetings with our contact at EWP, Evelyn Smith, so she could see our progress and guide us through the processes that the system was to automate. We also worked with the technical staff to gain access to the FTP server and to integrate the system we developed locally onto the EWP servers. Only three modules were complete at the end of the course, and since January 2006, I have been the team leader continuing the project within EWP with our team of programmers. Although the system is still a work in progress, course and user management is fully functional as well as the library/textbook request and computing request. Those sections of the site are currently in use throughout the Institute while the others are in development.