Outcomes Assessment Web Application for ABET accreditation agency

Ninth LACCEI Latin American and Caribbean Conference (LACCEI’2011), Engineering for a Smart Planet, Innovation, Information Technology and Computation...
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Ninth LACCEI Latin American and Caribbean Conference (LACCEI’2011), Engineering for a Smart Planet, Innovation, Information Technology and Computational Tools for Sustainable Development, August 3-5, 2011, Medellín, Colombia.

Outcomes Assessment Web Application for ABET accreditation agency Universidad del Turabo Alcides Alvear, [email protected] Luis Ruiz Linares, [email protected] Joksan Flores Rivera, [email protected] Jonathan Vargas Rodríguez, [email protected]

ABSTRACT The objective of this project is to design a web application that can help shorten the time of work for the engineering professors when doing the assessment at the end of each semester. There is a part of the process that is inevitable, such as the time professors need to spend to evaluate given tests and to determine objective scores. Professors need to insert all this data on spreadsheets on Microsoft Office Excel, which takes an incredible amount of time. The purpose of this project is to shorten the time and work in the data insertion process, generate the desired graphs and report of the whole process. Keywords: Assessment

1. INTRODUCTION The problem at hand is to improve the assessment procedure required by ABET for the School of Engineering of Universidad del Turabo. This process is one required by ABET for the engineering program to be accredited by them. Currently this process is done in Microsoft Excel where the professor has to enter a great amount of information to be able to generate graphs with the results required. The first set of data that the professor must enter is the one of direct assessment, which is with the information obtained by the different evaluation methods used by the professor. In this area the professor must fill the assessment of each objective student by student. The same process is done for the indirect assessment part, which is a questionnaire that the students have to fill out about the course in general. For each objective the professor has to generate graphs and one additional graph to compare the direct versus the indirect assessment. The second part consists of taking the average numbers calculated from the previous data and put them in their respective outcome. Each outcome has a certain amount of objectives from different courses assigned to them. After doing the first part of the assessment process and obtaining the average numbers of each objective the professor has to take certain averages and put them in their assigned outcome. This is a complicated process since the professor has to verify which objective goes to which outcome. After completing those processes the professor then generates a graph for each one of the outcomes. These processes are the ones that help a school and an engineering program to receive accreditation. The accreditation of an engineering program helps for the credibility of the school and the specific engineering program. By creating a program to automaticity most of the processes we will be helping the Universidad del Turabo School of Engineering. 2. METHODOLOGY The Engineering Assessment Project requires a well-organized methodology that drives it to successes without leaving important features and details behind. That’s why we decided to use the Incremental Model Methodology in order to accomplish the goals established earlier. This methodology will let the project to be divided in various release modules that each will then integrate at the end of the each release module with the previous modules that have been released earlier.

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-1

August 3-5, 2011

All modules will have to pass by each of the levels of the incremental model methodology:

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Design Code Testing Integration

After all modules have pass through this process then comes the whole system test. This final part will include real user testing to gather feedback to improve and refine the web application. 2.1 PROJECT METHODOLOGY FLOW CHART

2.2 REQUIREMENTS After establishing the project requirements, we decided to divide the project using the incremental model in four releases. The first requirement is the database setup. Data related to the objectives of courses will be stored in the database. However, the database must be designed in such a way that there can exist more than two different sections of the same course, differentiated by their sections, CRN and professors. Another necessity for this requirement is to establish a difference between direct assessment (objectives graded by professor) and indirect assessment (student’s opinion of the same objectives). The second requirement is to design a web application where professors can log in to a web site and can conduct data entry for direct and indirect assessments of their courses. The third requirement is to conduct a department assessment, made by the department head, which would gather all direct and indirect assessment scores for all courses of the same department, and would facilitate the department assessment. The fourth requirement is the implementation of administrative tools, to be used by the chosen administrator/s to ensure stability and moderation of the system.

• •

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Programming language • Java Web Programming Languages • Java Server Pages (JSP) • HTML • JavaScripts • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Relational database management system • MySQL Software • NetBeans IDE 6.7.1

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-2

August 3-5, 2011

• • • •

JfreeCharts Plugin iText Plugin MySQL Server MySQL Administrator 1.2

2.3 FEATURES

Portability- the project is developed as a website because this allows the user to have easy access to the application at any moment without the need of his/her own computer. Security- the users only are allowed to see information that will compete to them only. Charts and Graphics- the user can plot charts based on the values that they are entering to the application. Report Generation- the application also generates the report that the user needs to archive. 2.4 STATUS The first module of the project have already been released, the database system have already passed through the design level, in which we created an Entity Relationship Diagram to visually describe how the system will store all the necessary information to be viewed at the web application. The coding level was accomplished and all the necessary software to access and modify the database locally in one single computer has already been installed. We decided to use MySQL to program the whole database; we have installed the MySQL Administrator Toolkit and MySQL Server to run the database locally. After this, we made some preliminary testing to ensure that all the relations between the tables within the database are working. The professor’s tools in the web application part 1 are being developed. This part already has a working logging page, which directs to a menu page. The menu page has buttons to view the status of all current courses assessment.

3. DATABASE DESIGN In order to make an organized project and to create records in which the data gathered from the assessment process can be stored we decide to create a system that uses a database to store information. In the design process we decide to use the database with a web server using EasyPHP tool with MySQL, this system will give use the local tools and necessary environment to complete the project. In the database management design an entity relationship diagram had to be created due to the complexity of the project and sensitivity of the information that the system will be managing. In this relationship diagram we establish all the attributes and keys that every single table has and also we tested the cardinality on each one of them. As a result of this design process we obtained a well created database management system that has ten tables in which the information is stored in order to create separate records that can be linked between them according to the needs of the system. 3.1 ASSESSMENT DATABASE ENTITY RELATIONSHIP DIAGRAM

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-3

August 3-5, 2011

Figure 1. Partial view of Database E-R diagram

3.2 WEB APPLICATION DESIGN In the design of a web application we as software developers have to analyze many things like what the user needs on the application and how the user will interact with this application. Based on this we create an easy to use web application to work the assessment process of the Universidad Del Turabo Engineering School. First of all the application that is being developed manage information of high sensitivity like personal information of the faculty and confidential data from the assessment process and because of that the application have a login page in what the user is authenticated using certain restrictions to access the application. The web application has a main menu at its beginning after the login page in which the user can select what is going to do like, process direct or indirect course assessment, create the needed graphs by objective and by courses and also has account settings options. Users like departments directors have more options like process the department’s assessment. On the direct and indirect course assessment page the user has different fields in which the user can fill out the information required to make the assessment process possible as bars to make the selection of the course that he/she will be making the assessment. Also in this page the user has the option of upload a picture of an image that describes the problem used to evaluate the objective. In the graphs pages the user will have the option of select the courses that he/she teaches in order to generate the desired graphs. The course to be selected should have passed the assessment process before generate the graphs because if the assessment process is not already done there is no information to generate the graphs. The application also has an account settings page in which the user can make changes to his/her account information like username, e-mail, passwords, etc. In this page also the administrators of the web page can delete users, create new users, and make changes to some data and some other things. 3.3 WEB APPLICATION SCREEN SHOTS Following figures show each of the pages with the information necessary to move through the entire application. The application has about 15 pages that allow users to: manage, enter, edit, print and view information and user profile. 3.4 LOGIN PAGE Figure 1 shows the initial page that allows user authentication application. Every user must have an account created before connecting, and profile defines each of the options they can access. The application provides three attempts to connect, if a failure occurs in three attempts, you should contact the system administrator to make arrangements.

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-4

August 3-5, 2011

Figure 2. Login page

3.5 MENU PAGE This page has the options menu of the application and welcomes users when they establish a connection.

Figure 3. Principal page

3.6 MENU OPTION BUTTONS Figure 4 shows the 9 menu options and allow navigation for each of the topics of the application.

Figure 4. Menu options buttons

3.7 PROFILE MODIFICATION PAGE

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-5

August 3-5, 2011

Figure 5. Profile modification page

3.8 PROFESSOR CURRENT COURSES & ASSESSMENT STATUS

Figure 6. Courses and assessment status per Professor

Figure 6 shows the information of all courses assigned to Professor, this information is: course code, section, semester, quantity and description of objectives covered by the course and a mark to indicate whether direct assessment and indirect assessment ending. 3.9 COURSE OBJECTIVES

Figure 7.Objective of courses Figure 7 shows the page about direct assessment, once the teacher completes this information the application displays a green checkmark indicating that it was completed, otherwise it shows a red symbol with the letter x. 3.10

DIRECT ASSESSMENT RUBRIC

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-6

August 3-5, 2011

Figure 8 shows the page that lets you record and edit direct assessment information, this information is about the behavior of the grade of all students of the course as the objective applies.

Figure 8. Direct assessment 3.11

REPORT GENERATOR OPTIONS

Figure 9.Report options

3.12

REPORT PREVIEW (PRINTABLE IN PDF)

Figure 10.Report preview

Figures 9 and 10 show the pages to generate all the reports of the Assessment, or the individual report for each course the teacher. Eventually the application provides a preview of the report before printing. 4. CONCLUSION This project will be very beneficial for the coordinator, department directors and professors. It will make the whole assessment process easier and faster than before. The reports with all the assessment rubrics and graphs will be generated with just three steps: 1) Select Course 2) Select Print options 3) Generate Report. Hopefully this

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-7

August 3-5, 2011

web application can be easy to understand by the users and all the necessary feedback can be received to improve the application. 5. References Frank Tsui, Orlando Karam (2007), Essentials of Software Engineering 1st ed., Jones and Barlett. Hans Bergsten, (2003) , Java Server Pages ,3rd ed. , O’REILLY. Robin Nixon (2009), Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript , 1st ed. , O’REILLY. James Turner, (2002), MySQL and JSP Web Applications Data-Driven Programming Using Tomcat and MySQL, 1st ed. , SAMS. Herbert Schildt, (2007) , Java : The Complete Reference , 7th ed. McGraw Hill. Building a Java Desktop Database Application Retrieved from: http://testwww.netbeans.org/kb/60/java/guidb.html Connecting to a MySQL Database in NetBeans, IDE, Retrieved from http://www.netbeans.org/kb/55/mysql.html

Authorization and Disclaimer Authors authorize LACCEI to publish the paper in the conference proceedings. Neither LACCEI nor the editors are responsible either for the content or for the implications of what is expressed in the paper.

Medellin, Colombia

9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology WE1-8

August 3-5, 2011

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