Changes made to eCAFE

Changes to eCAFE:

In general, the changes all were made to correct issues that came up when dealing with the community colleges, and the rest were to simplify in areas that appeared to give users trouble.

Staff:
1.) No more “Override Concurrent Courses.” Not a single department used this through all three pilot tests, and it seemed to cause confusion. In the interests of keeping things simple we removed this feature. We can add it back in should it prove necessary.
2.) No more reordering of questions. This was another infrequently-used feature which seemed to cause more harm than good. Instead, questions appear in the order they are defined in eCAFE. There is some logic to the order as defined by eCAFE, and an argument can be made that results would be more consistent across the board if the questions appeared in a standard order.
3.) We switched from a department focus to handling all “organizations” with organizations being defined as campuses, colleges, divisions, departments, and subjects. While Manoa is primary department oriented, other campuses operate at the college (ex: WCC) or campus level (ex: HCC). The department-only model didn’t even work entirely for UH as some needed it to work at the subject level (ex: the ICS department breaks down into ICS, LIS, and CIS, all of which wanted a different question set). The system now allows for any organizational level to be used.
4.) Staff members see all instructors who are teaching a class for their organization, regardless of who the instructor is “employed” by. So, in the event of a crosslisted class, all organizations involved will see the instructor for that class.
5.) Setting the primary department of crosslisted courses. This is an experimental feature. We need a means of knowing which org has priority over a crosslisted course. For example, in the case where History and Women’s Studies have a crosslisted course between them, but WS is the one paying for the instructor, then WS should be considered as primary so the instructor gets the settings defined by that organization. This feature allows the staff member to indicate which organization takes precedence. Note that this feature is not used when all setup is done at the campus level (like HCC).

Instructors:
1.) No more “personally defined questions.” Another little-used question that was rarely used correctly. We found most instructors that used this were just re-writing the same questions that already appeared in the standard list of eCAFE questions.
2.) No more reordering of questions. Same logic as for the staff.
3.) Instructors will get the settings defined by the organization of the course they are teaching, not necessarily whom they are employed by. The previous model of using the department they were paid by caused many problems. For example, roughly 60 percent of FAMR’s instructors are from other departments, and some departments reported borrowing instructors from other departments as a trial before hiring them on. Since those instructors weren’t on their payroll, they didn’t get the settings for those departments.
4.) When there are multiple instructors for a class, we allow them all to have a survey. Previously, one instructor was designated as “Primary” and would be the only one to get a survey. Now, they all have the option to give a survey to the students if they want to. So, for a course with two instructors, the student will be presented with two individual surveys, one for each instructor.
5.) When a course is crosslisted under multiple departments, the survey will contain all questions set by all departments that course is crosslisted under.
6.) The instructors will get an email listing the names of all of the students in each of their classes. We were having a problem with students occasionally be omitted (late registration, or registration through outreach), or appearing when they shouldn’t (late withdrawal). While we updated our database to handle for those issues, they still occurred. So, we’re asking the instructors to look over the list and let us know if there are any issues.

Students:
No significant changes.

New Usage Dates

We changed some of our dates to better synchronize with the paper version, and because some of the data we need isn't available until later in the semester than we anticipated.

Staff: September 8th -> September 26
Instructors: October 8th -> November 7th
Students: November 24th -> December 12th
Results: December 24th
Publish: January 12, 2009