Recently in Freshman Academy Category

We've condensed the teams, so there is one team per CRN now. This doesn't change where students need to go for the weekly presentation, but it does change who all is in their team. No one is removed from a team unless they drop the course all together, but this will add students to teams. It was split so there were two teams per CRN. This also changed the mentors' views. Now, there are two mentors per team rather than one, so they will be co-mentoring for one team. Again, no students are taken away except for those that have dropped.

I've also added more to the student main web page. There is now a link for seeing their grades from the Freshman Academy writing assignments. From there, they can view the details of that assignment and how it was graded.

We had the last catch-up orientation meeting for mentors. One more showed. She seemed really excited about the project. I have great hopes.

I've modified the student page and corrected a couple minor errors concerning student schedules for ICS101 (Freshman Academy). Based on the schedule sheet I receieved (rev sep 19) their pages are completely updated and correct. I did a test running through as a member of each team and it showed the correct data. I also added their assignments, when they are due and the grading rubric for each kind of assignment.

Now if we could just get them to use it...

Last night wrapped up the second of two nights of presentations for the Freshman Academy that I needed to attend. It was two late nights with early mornings, but it should start to slow down now. Things seem to be going really well, at least on the computer side. I'll want to meet with the fellows early next week to make sure they know about their site and how to use it.

I just noticed today that the calendar of events program that I spent forever working on, and in fact, had requests to modify it in the last two weeks, has been completely scrapped. That would have been useful and time-saving if someone had bothered to mentioned it to me. I also was using that same information through the portal, so that will have to be completely modified and most likely removed altogether, depending on how the new calendar of events is put together. Grrrr.

We had a miscommunication issue on Friday which resulted in all the Freshman being mis-informed as to what team they belonged to at their orientation. Now we need to do clean up and figure out the best way to inform them of their correct team. Since every freshman will need to attend one of the lectures on Tuesday or Wednesday, we're going to make them sign in and then hand them a list of all their team members. At the end, they'll be able to meet their team members and hopefully this will get the majority of the students. We'll have all the FAIT members and about 8 or 9 Fellows there to direct the students and get them the information as quickly as possible.

The fellows will also be able to meet their students as well. Before hand, they can log into the fellow page and view a list of all their students.

Yesterday and today we had 'Mentor Training', which is just an informal setting to get all the mentors together for question/answer sessions. Yesterday went pretty bad. There was too much confusion and the mentors seemed a little freaked out and disturbed. I really hope the first group don't get discourage from that meeting. This is a new project for us all and we are all learning as we go. The meeting today went so much better. We handed out information from the beginning, gave a very brief overview with the mentors position in this endeavor apparent. It made is so much easier to go over my small part quickly and with minimal confusion. I've set up a mentor mailing list: academymentors so we can quickly communicate to everyone.

I received the vote to make the mentor information page alias to be www.wou.edu/mentors, so Ron created that for me yesterday. Today I had the request to have a list of all the mentors and their contact information, so I added that as a link from the mentor page. I'll also be adding a function so that the mentors can post a note to their student's info page as another way to contact them. This function is already available to all admins from the admin page, so it's just a matter of ingrating it into the mentors sections.

I've also wrapped up the fellow's sections of the program. They have the options to grade ( with all the grading rubrics created as forms), rename the teams and get a list of all their students.

When I stated that I received the finally CRN list on Saturday, what I guess I really meant was the final list for that day. They've yet again scrunched the CRNs down, which means I'll need to completely revamp everything I did on Saturday. I just about crawled under the table and cried when I was told. Oh well, since I've already done it once, I hope it won't take nearly as long to do it again. I'll need to sort the students based on what CRN they are registered for, split each group into two teams, pull out a few special cases to make sure they are in a specific group, and assign mentors and fellows to each group (including a couple special cases there). When I can write out everything that needs to be done in one sentence, you'd think it wouldn't take very long...wrong. I have to jump back and forth between databases, create temp tables, sort, resort, match up and put it all into one table. I'm trying to figure out a way to automate as much as possible, but I haven't been able to come up with it.

I just got back from another meeting in the Writing Center to go over all the HowTo's I've written for Wiki. Fortunately, they seem to be happy with them and I don't think I'll need to change much for them. I've written a HowTo on registration, creating groups, and making a team page. I'll make these links available on the students info page, wiki help, freshman academy page, writing center page, and available to all lab attendants so they can help the freshmen wade through each step.

I'm off to be introduced at convocation, then I'll continue working until my meeting with the mentors this afternoon to show them how to get to their page for information on their students.

Well, I had a long and painful weekend. I finally received the final CRN list from registrar about 11:30 Saturday. I was able to query for all the students registered for ICS 101 and get the CRNs to divide all the students into teams. There were about 8 students registered for Freshman Academy that do not have accounts in LDAP yet, so I only have their VNumbers. Final bulk accounts for new students should be created today.

Sunday morning, I received the final list of Fellows and the CRNs they are working with. I put all that info into the tables. After that I worked on all the different pages this program needs for the fellows and mentors. With grading, it's gotten more complicated, as fellows cannot have full access to the program as admins, however, there are some admins that are also fellows.

I worked full days both Saturday and Sunday, and yesterday I helped my dad move 1503 paver bricks between working morning and evening! My back is killing me.

Current list of packages for academy schema:
admin
assignments
editadmin
editfellows
freshmen
home
idates
notes
teams
grades
fellows

The final crn list for all Freshman Academy 101 classes should be finalized today. I'll grab the list from banner and split all the students up into teams based on crn. Each class should contain no more than 20 students and each team should contain no more than 10 students. Teams will be randomly created by splitting the registered students per crn into two teams. Each team will need to be assigned a mentor and a fellow, which will, for the most part, be choosen randomly as well. We have a decent number of volunteer mentors already, but it looks like we'll still need to double up some. The fellows list is much small, so I'll need to find out exactly how the writing center wants to handle the disbursement of fellows to teams.

I'm working on the grades section of the program for Freshman Academy. There are numerous assignment for Academy 101 that will go through the Writing Center submitted electronically. There needs to be a convenient way for the Fellows (student tutors/graders) to record the grades so they will be available to the students.

On a side note, my back yard is replanted and I've started leveling and putting the gravel down for my new patio.

I've been working almost entirely on Freshman Academy. The start of school is just around the corner and has creaped up fast! I'm still ironing out some kinks and am really just waiting for the finalized data to be put into the program. I'm going to try and pull as much information out of banner so this will go smoother next year without having to try and pull teeth by getting spreadsheets sent to me. That will cover the student side, however mentors, fellows and assignments will always need to be entered manually since they change constantly are not already in the system. A lot of this information isn't even in electronic format. I've been talking with Mark Baldwin about how best to extract student information from banner tables and he's been a big help. I'm sure there will be issues once the program starts getting used, but I'm hoping to minimize the changes needed.

admin side

student side

My time lately has been taken up with the new Freshman Academy. Between meetings, tutorials, and "just one more change", I've been swamped. Since this is a brand new endeavor for this university, new ideas always turn into tweaking the program, which translates and re-writing my code on an almost continual basis.

Ah, the life of a programmer...

Today I officially joined the Freshman Academy Implementation Team (FAIT). I've now met our Provost, Dr. Jem Spectar, though I didn't realize who he was until after he left. I've been working on the programming aspect of this endeavor for a while now, but it's finally starting to solidify. We have a great group of people from across campus working on this project and have really started to crack down. We have a great list of volunteer mentors (thank you all) that will be helping create this new, closer environment for incoming freshman.

To make this transition for the incoming class to be as easy and natural as possible, requires quite a bit of planning and work on our part. There are many details to look at, problems to solve, and we'll need to be thinking on our feet throughout the year when those guaranteed hiccups arise. I'm excited to be involved in this pioneering process.

The new student information page for freshman will include all the information they will need to complete the Freshman Academy 101 project throughout the year. It will be continually updated by mentors, professors, fellows and the FAIT members. Plus, no new username and password to remember! The administration side is still private and under construction. I'm looking into smoother ways to import all the information needed for these students without manual input. Since I now have a little experience connecting with Banner, I may start to pull the information out of there automatically, therefore making this program run even smoother next year.

I had a pre-meeting with Katherine Schmidt and Heidi Jackson yesterday to discuss the required writing assignments, both group and individual, and how they will be handled electronically. I believe, based on a conversation with my fellow IT members, that the wiki server is probably the best way to go with this. I've pointed both Katherine and Heidi to this resource and it's help page for them to explore. The blogs, which UCS originally implemented for the project, will not be appropriate, as they really need something that can be limited in availability to other users. The blog server is still implemented, however, for not only incoming freshmen, but all WOU users. Be sure to check out Ron's blog for details on this great tool.

I had a meeting with Joe Sendelbaugh the week before and we discussed the tools that UCS is offering that will best compliment the new Freshman Academy. We're currently offering three tools for collaborative/public works, the forums, blogs, and wiki. Since each student will need to be able to use these tools and have specific permissions so only them and/or group member can view/edit the work, we realized forums would not work, as each permission has to be done by the administrator with a gui interface. Considering that's 900 students with possible two or three groups, it would just not be feasible. Secondly, the blogs, while a wonderful public interface for individual's expression, will not fit, as they need the individual assignments to be private. That leaves the wiki server. It appears this will be the best, most flexible tool for both group assignments and individual assignments, as each student can do the permissions on their own and can set up as many groups as needed. This seemed to be the best solution for UCS and the Freshman Academy.

UCS is working diligently to train all staff and lab students on the use of the wiki server (along will all the other tools we offer) so all incoming freshman, and whomever else is interested in these tools, can go to anyone and be able to ask questions and receive clear directions. We are also in the process of collaboratively creating a howto document which should provide nearly all the information anyone needs to use the wiki server. Not surprising, it's being developed as a wiki!

This has been a fun and exciting project for all of us, and it hasn't even started yet! The first year of anything is always a little scary and exciting and we'll be able to see just how great this will be for all of campus.

In case you are unfamiliar, which most people should be considering it's brand new, the Freshman Academy will be a new program designed by Joe Sendelbaugh to "ease the transition into college and increase the likelihood of student success." It will be a manditory, year-long, three-credit course for all incoming freshman which will include workshops, exercises, presentations and group projects. For a general overview, look here.