Email to staff members

Here's the body of the email all staff members get this week:

Update: this was sent Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:33:03

Dear ,

The UH Course And Faculty Evaluation (eCAFE) system is now up and running. Please visit http://www.hawaii.edu/ecafe to login and setup your department surveys. You have until Friday, February 15th before the staff setup period closes. After the 15th, you will be unable to make any further changes.

Once you log in, you will see several buttons that guide you through the setup process.

1) Edit faculty survey: Go here to set the questions that will appear on all surveys for your department's faculty members. You can add and remove questions and set the order that the questions appear in. If your department has set up a survey during our previous pilot test, you can click the "Clone" button next to the past survey to copy any of those questions into your current survey.

2) Update settings: This button takes you to a page where you have two actions. First, you set whether or not you want to allow your department's faculty members to add their own questions to the survey, in addition to the ones you personally selected. Second, you can select which faculty members have mandatory surveys, and for which faculty the surveys are optional. Please make sure ALL instructors who are teaching in your department are listed on this page. If any are omitted, please let us know as any instructor not listed on the page will not receive a survey.

3) Override concurrent courses: From here, you can select a TA as the primary instructor of a concurrent course.

Thank you again for volunteering to participate in the eCAFE pilot test. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us by email or phone ().

Mahalo,

DB Schema V.2

Change:

Added an auto-generated id to the person table. This is what is referenced in all other tables now. Should make things easier to handle when the banner or ods ids change. Also solves the issue where all other level ids were numbers and person's was a varchar.

ODS id problem

[From Swee]

I have encountered problem when I did a update_banner_id_changes. We
should NOT assign a bogus ods_id to some of the secretaries who do not
have an entries in the ODS.

We assigned a bogus ods_id='1' to 'a' (WS secretary). When I
updated Spring 2008 data, the ods_id=1 have been assigned in the ODS.
Therefore, 'a' had overwritten with 'b'. So, 'b' become the staff role for WS. I have removed 'b' from the
Admin_and_staff table.

We also had assigned two more bogus ods_id to the following secretarys:
700000 'c'
700001 'd'

To solve it:
1.) Add the secretary into the banner, so that they will have a unique
person_uid. I have talked to Judy from ODS, and she said she will
bring that up in the upcoming banner meeting.
2.) If the charset of person.ods_id is varchar, then the bogus ods_id
should start with 'CAFE-' to avoid the collision of the same ods_id.

eCAFE Database Diagram V.1

See the image in full size.  You can also right click on the image and select the option to view it in a new tab or window.

The changes from old eCAFE schema (V.7):

1.) Stripped out org_code in favor of level_type and level_id.  A level_type is one of department, division, college, campus, or instructor.  The main effect of this change is that instructors now get the survey of the department the course is in, not of the department OHR says they are employed by.

2.) Got rid of org and org_department tables...  Good riddance.

3.) Consolidated instructor_question_set and org_question_set into one table, level_question_set.  This has the side effect of allowing all levels to add questions to a survey, rather than just a department or the instructor.  This should handle issues of community colleges where they do things on the division or college level as departments are too small.

4.) Got rid of the admin_and_staff_permission table which was never used.

5.) Got rid of unnecessary info in the admin_and_staff table.

6.) Added a "total_enrollment" field to the survey table.   This is to handle crosslisted courses where multiple sections make up a survey and we need to consolidate the enrollment from all sections into one number.  This will fix the bug where a crosslisted course can have a large enrollment, but any one section of it with less than three students will cause those students to not have survey access.

7.) Added faculty_max_questions and faculty_can_add fields to department, division, college, campus.  Again, this is to allow the community colleges to control things on a higher perspective than just departmental.  This still needs refinement, as what's to prevent a college from overwriting a department's settings or vice versa?  Considering we assign who gets access to where, perhaps this isn't a big issue as we can prevent there being multiple people in a single hierarchy.

8.) Changed all references of instructor.id to user.banner_id as banner_id's sometimes change and the ladder of foreign keys makes it very difficult to do the updates.

9.) Added instructor_id (FK user.banner_id) to the enrollment table.  This table is used to tell which classes a student has and to indicate if they did the survey for the class or not.  Since we are going to set things up to work for all instructors of a class and not just the primary, there needs to be a separate entry per class/instructor combination, hence the new field.