Running head: Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
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Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
Team Black
Jose Brandariz
CS411W
Janet Brunelle and Hill Price
03/17/2014
Version 2
Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
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Table of Contents
1
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 3
2
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION .......................................................................................................... 4
2.1
Key Product Features and Capabilities............................................................................. 4
2.2
Major Components (Hardware/Software) ....................................................................... 5
3
IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY............................................................................................. 7
4
PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION .................................................................................... 12
4.1
Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software) ............................................................... 13
4.2
Prototype Features and Capabilities .............................................................................. 15
4.3
Prototype Developmental Challenges ........................................................................... 16
Glossary ......................................................................................................................................... 18
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 21
List of Figures
Figure 1. TPOT major functional components. ............................................................................... 6
Figure 2. Current Process Flow: Assessment .................................................................................. 8
Figure 3. Improved Process Flow: Deliverable Assessment Feedback ........................................... 9
Figure 4. Current Process Flow: Status Determination. ............................................................... 10
Figure 5. Improved Process Flow: Status Determination. ............................................................ 11
List of Tables
Table 1. Feature comparison between real world product and prototype.................................. 15
Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
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Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
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INTRODUCTION
Managing courses with multiple teams simultaneously is becoming a common task “more
than 6.7 million, or roughly a third, of all students enrolled in postsecondary education took an
online course for credit” (Allen and Seaman). On the work environment, it is estimated that more
than half of employees work in at least partially virtual teams. Existing project management
software contains solutions to some problems encountered by instructors in these types of
courses, but the products are not designed for the academic field and they consider only the
collaborative end and not the role of supervision.
The current solution lacks automation, forcing the instructor to do all operations
manually. The result is a fragmented, slow, and easily incorrect process. Because instructors do
not have easy ways to communicate, storage of files with students and teams, they must check
every email and file individually. The actual solution utilizes various ways to submit files and
communicate with the instructor, making it very time consuming for the instructor to keep up
with each student and team.
The proposed solution is Team Project Organizational Tool or TPOT. TPOT is a project
management tool designed to reduce or erase the stated problems. TPOT gives the opportunity
for team members to access the team site through a variety of media, giving a center for file
sharing and communication. The core of TPOT is the Instructor Dashboard that allows the
administrator to easily look into projects and team member activities rather than tediously going
through each site to complete the same simple operations. TPOT proposes to organize the data
of a project in a way that it can be easily presented to instructors, making their work simpler.
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PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Team Project Organizational Tool, or TPOT, is the solution to the problem caused by the
enormous amount of students enrolling in online, project-based courses. TPOT will be a webbased solution that will ease the problems derived from virtual teams. It will consist of a web
dashboard for the instructor and Google Sites for the students to place all the required documents
and files for the course that will be gathered with Google App Scripts and stored in a database.
The product will reduce the time an instructor expends in the search for the files and
other information of each team, so he or she may focus on providing the highest possible quality
instruction and his or her other duties. It will also improve team member accountability by
recording every way in which team members participate in the collaborative process. TPOT will
also provide a concise summary of project status and ensure that team members are aware of
their own responsibilities with its task system. The final result is an efficient and transparent
collaboration between team members and the instructor.
2.1
Key Product Features and Capabilities
TPOT will collect data from team Google Sites and display it in a comprehensive way for
the instructor. TPOT will be able to handle a multitude of teams at any time. The instructor
dashboard will include summaries of user activity and team and user tasks. The dashboard will
include a notification tab which alerts the instructor to any new messages or deliverables
received.
The Instructor Dashboard will be comprised of different tabs. The tabs will consist of
Overview, Teams, Tasks, Files, Activity, Grades, and Admin. The Overview is the main page
and will present a summary of the different tabs. The Teams tab will contain all the teams the
instructor is managing at this time and will contain links to each Team Sites.
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The Grading tab will allow the instructor to enter grades for each team member or enter a
general grade to each team, giving that grade to all the students on that team. The tab will
provide the ability to choose the assignment by course, class, and team. The instructor can also
give team and individual feedback through this tab.
The Files tab is a list of all files that teams have submitted through the Team Sites. The
list of files will contain fields such as student name, team, date of delivery, or date of last
modification. The system will mark which files need to be graded and will direct the instructor to
the grade page. The list will be sorted or searched by fields such as student name, team, or date
of delivery.
An important feature of TPOT is the ability to track accountability of users. This ability
will be displayed in the Activity tab. The system will keep track of user upload of deliverables
and other site activity for each member of each team. This information shows to instructors about
which team members have been active participants in the development process.
With the Tasks tab the instructor will create and assign tasks to students, teams, or entire
courses. The teams available to assign tasks will be collected from the teams the instructor is
managing at the moment. This tab will allow assignments to be issued to students in an efficient
manner.
2.2
Major Components (Hardware/Software)
The TPOT Instructor Dashboard will be hosted on a third party server running on a
virtual machine. The TPOT’s database server will be hosted by the ODU Computer Science
Department on a virtual machine. The team sites are hosted by Google on Google Sites, after
being generated with a custom template.
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The Google Site is created by the instructor at the beginning of the academic semester. It
is used to generate the team sites which the students will be using throughout the semester. The
template defines the look and feel and also the display of the content in individual team
sites. Students are able to change the look of their site through Google Site’s built-in editor.
The Google Sites are part of the actual solution, but have been managed and evaluated by
the instructor personally. TPOT will work with the existing sites to automatically extract the
information needed to provide feedback, grades, files and user activity to the instructor. This
automation uses the querying of the database for specific information. From there, the
information can be assessed appropriately. For the querying of the database, TPOT will use
MySQL which will be installed on the virtual machine host. TPOT will establish
communication between the Google Sites and the database through Google App Scripts
generated with the template of the team sites. The Google App Scripts will access and
manipulate the files, tasks, users and their attributes which are stored in the database. All the
distribution of the Major Components can be seen on Figure 1.
Figure 1. TPOT major functional components.
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IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY
This project was proposed by Dr. Pilar Pazos-Lago, Assistant Professor in the department
of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Old Dominion University. She received
her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering with a focus on Engineering Management from Texas Tech
University in 2005. Much of her work concerns the behavior of successful project teams.
Before joining ODU, she worked in the areas of team learning and quality control. Her
research interests include organizational learning, collaborative learning, group decision making
and performance, virtual teams, and team dynamics. She was a Research Associate at
Northwestern University with a joint position for the VaNTH Engineering Research Center
(Departament of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering).
Dr. Pazos became concerned by the difficulty of managing multiple team projects in
online courses. Instructors of these online, project-based courses are often managing 15 or more
teams. With this number of teams, it becomes difficult to track team status, offer accurate
support and feedback, and quickly assess deliverables for each team. In addition, students have
difficulties collaborating, mostly due to the lack of face-to-face interaction with team members.
Currently, the organization of teams is left in its entirety to instructors. In addition,
instructors and students do not have tools to easily aggregate team data. Most of the
communications are made with little more than ad hoc solutions by using email, Blackboard or
other specialized tools.
As can be seen on Figure 2, the assessment of deliverables is a sprawling and tedious
process. The instructor have to search through a variety of places to look for deliverables, from
e-mails to team sites, and also look for who are the members’ of that team so he or she can give
the feedback and grade to the proper students.
Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
Figure 2. Current Process Flow: Assessment
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Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
To solve the problem, Dr. Pazos proposed to TPOT an Instructor Dashboard that will
collect data from the team sites. TPOT ease the assessment of deliverables by making the team
data available in a single interface, as shown on Figure 3. Furthermore, providing feedback is
added to the assessment to reduce the workload for instructors.
Figure 3. Improved Process Flow: Deliverable Assessment Feedback
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Lab 1 – TPOT Product Description
As revealed on Figure 4, team status determination is full with repetitive actions. To
determine the status, instructors have to navigate to multiple pages for every team, recording
status as they go. Instructors must also search through their email accounts for messages from
students.
Figure 4. Current Process Flow: Status Determination.
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Similar to the assessment of deliverables, the status determination is reduced to a visit to a single
page on the Instructor Dashboard, as Figure 5 shows. Instructors will not need to visit every page
of a team site in order to determine what progress a team has achieved. All this condensation of
status determination and assesment of deliverables will ease the workload of the instructor.
Figure 5. Improved Process Flow: Status Determination.
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PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION
The goal of the TPOT prototype is to produce a dashboard built on top of existing team
sites, increasing an instructor's ability to develop students' virtual team and collaborative skills.
The prototype will achieve this by organizing and monitoring team site data such that it may be
included into the database. Once collected, team site data will be shown to users, providing only
the information needed on each page. This will increase the instructor’s time to develop
students’ virtual team skills, given that the team achieves some specific goal given by the
instructor.
One goal the TPOT prototype is trying to achieve is providing users with the necessary
quantity of information regarding their projects. The TPOT prototype will provide the status to
all members of a project. The task system will ensure that users know what assignments need to
be completed, by whom, when, and if it is to be completed by more than one student, what the
role of the student in that assignment. TPOT users will know the project's status through
notifications designed with a system of database triggers. When a condition is reached, an email
or other alert will inform each involved user that the condition has been met. The activity
tracking system will give students and mentors the ability to know about actions taken that affect
their projects. It will also allow them to see the activity of their team members. The goal of the
TPOT prototype is to provide users with necessary information to make easier to provide
appropriate feedback and better collaboration opportunities.
Another goal of the prototype is to reduce the time spent by instructors in performing
administration activities. These repetitive activities include assessment of deliverables, deliver
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feedback, determining the status of projects, and assigning tasks. The TPOT prototype will
reduce the time spent in the determination of the project status giving instructors with a web page
which shows the team's recent activity, task progress, and messages to the instructor. To assess
deliverables and provide feedback, the TPOT prototype will give the instructor an easy to
navigate interface that shows the submitted deliverables for grading with the correspondent
forms to give feedback and post the grade obtained. The instructors will be able to create tasks
and assign them to students, teams, or courses with intuitively.
4.1
Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software)
The TPOT prototype is intended to have the same structure and features as the real world
product, as seen in Figure 6. The TPOT database will reside on an ODU virtual machine server.
Equally, the instructor dashboard will be hosted on an ODU virtual machine server. A virtual
environment will be generated in order to test TPOT, using a wide array of operating system and
browser combinations. The remainder of the prototype mirrors the planned real product.
Figure 6. TPOT Prototype major components.
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The TPOT database will be a virtual MySQL server. The TPOT database will provide
the schema from which the data will be extracted from the team sites. Additionally, the database
will contain triggers written in SQL that will alert the involved users of changes in their project.
The prototype database will be generated with automatically produced data and simulated
student data. The creation of data will be generated with PHP consisting on SQL updates to the
database. A bigger testing program must be built to test the multiple connections to the database
to ensure that the database is robust.
The instructor dashboard will be written in HTML and PHP. It will consist of an interface
divided into tabs that will allocate different tables easily customizable to extract the needed
information. The dashboard will also contain a series of SQL queries and updates embedded in
PHP to populate the tables.
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The team site page templates will be modified to provide the necessary structure of the
data to record the work done by each team member. These modifications include the embedding
of Google Apps Scripts to communicate with the TPOT database to upload and update the data.
To create the GUI elements of the team site templates, HTML will also be used. The different
aspects with respect to the real world solution can be summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Feature comparison between real world product and prototype.
4.2
Prototype Features and Capabilities
The main feature of the TPOT prototype will be its novel instructor dashboard and its
ability to ease instructors of virtual project course workload. With the dashboard, instructors can
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determine the status, assigned task, deliverables and feedback of teams in a quick
manner. Thanks to the reduced workload on the instructors’ part, the student will benefit with a
more focused instructor. This will allow students to develop their collaborative skills that will
help them on their future jobs.
The other principal feature is to improve the access at information of a project. One of the
main obstacles with virtual teams involves the shortage of information. With the TPOT prototype
a team member will be able to collect all the necessary information to obtain the project status
and his or her role with that status by tracking activities, update alerts, and project status updates.
To ensure TPOT prototype improves collaboration, it will have to be extensively tested.
The first test will be with fake or real data, whenever possible, by students. After the success of
the test, it will augment in scope, testing connectivity and stress-testing the database and
software to ensure its robustness.
4.3
Prototype Developmental Challenges
One challenge found in the TPOT prototype is the security issue. Because some student
teams may involve grants and economic interests, the intellectual property must be secured while
the project is being developed. Additionally, privacy is an important factor. All communication
between students and instructors should be kept confidential, as well as the grades and feedback
involving the student. These risks will be mitigated with the use of best practices while
development of the prototype.
Another challenge TPOT must surpass in the development of the prototype is the
multiple logins problem. The Google Sites that TPOT will oversee require a Google account to
access it. TPOT needs its users to be identified in the database individually. The issue then is to
see if a joint login, between TPOT and Google, is possible.
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Finally, the challenge of the prototype is how to efficiently structure the userinterface. The interface can be built in a multiple number of ways, but TPOT must focus in the
development of an intuitive, effective interface, and multi-platform. If the interface is not
efficient, the prototype will suffer the problem TPOT is trying to solve. The interface must be
also intuitive to give the user a simple view while not hindering its usability. To mitigate these
factors, TPOT will test with students and instructors to develop an intuitive and well organized
interface.
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Glossary
Activity Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that tracks team member activity.
Admin Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that provides administrative functions.
API: An application programming interface that specifies how some software components
should interact with each other.
Asynchronous: A student-centered teaching method that uses online learning resources to
facilitate information sharing outside the constraints of time and place among a network
of people.
Back-end: Application or program that serves indirectly in support of the front-end services,
usually by being closer to the required resource or having the capability to communicate
with the required resource.
Beta test: A test for a computer product prior to commercial release.
Blackboard: A web-based server software which features course management, customizable
open architecture, and scalable design that allows integration with student information
systems and authentication protocols.
Cloud: A variety of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected
through a real-time communication network such as the Internet.
Collaboration Software: Software suites designed to organize the collaborative efforts of a
professional team.
Dangling Pointer: Pointers that do not point to a valid object of the appropriate type. These are
special cases of memory safety violations.
Deliverable: A tangible or intangible object produced as a result of the project that is intended to
be delivered to a customer (either internal or external).
File Cabinet: File cabinet pages let you store and organize files from your computer's hard drive,
making it an easy way to share files with other users of your site. Anyone subscribed to
the page will be notified when files are added, changed, or removed.
Files Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that assembles all team deliverables.
Filter: A higher-order function that processes a data structure (typically a list) in some order to
produce a new data structure containing exactly those elements of the original data
structure for which a given predicate returns the Boolean value true.
Front-end: Application that application users interact with directly.
All definitions in the Glossary are taken from Wikipedia, Google, Old Dominion University,
Blackboard, WhatIs, Webopedia, or developed by Team Black specifically for use in TPOT.
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Google Apps Scripts: A cloud-based scripting language for light-weight application development
in the Google Apps platform.
Google Sites: A structured wiki- and web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the
Google Apps Productivity suite.
Grades Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that allows for viewing and assigning of grades for
individuals and teams.
GUI: A type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through
graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, as opposed to text-based
interfaces, typed command labels, or text navigation.
Industry Partner: A business or government professional working with or mentoring a school
project team.
Instructor Dashboard: A page at the front of the control panel for a website's content
management system.
Instructor-side: TPOT content located on the instructor dashboard.
Manager: The person assuming the task of overall management of all teams coordinated through
TPOT.
Member: Any individual in any team coordinated through TPOT.
Messages Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that allows a user to create, send, receive, and read
messages.
Method: A subroutine (or procedure or function) associated with an object, and which has access
to its data.
MySQL: An open-source relational database management system.
ODU: Old Dominion University, a dynamic public research institution that serves its students
and enriches the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation and the world through rigorous
academic programs, strategic partnerships, and active civic engagement.
Overview Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that tracks recent changes to other tabs.
Penetration test: An attack on a computer system with the intention of finding security
weaknesses, potentially gaining access to it, its functionality and data.
Platform: A hardware architecture and a software framework (including application
frameworks), where the combination allows software to run.
All definitions in the Glossary are taken from Wikipedia, Google, Old Dominion University,
Blackboard, WhatIs, Webopedia, or developed by Team Black specifically for use in TPOT.
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Pointer: A programming language object whose value refers directly to (or "points to") another
value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address.
Project Management Software: See Collaboration Software.
Scrape: A computer software technique of extracting information from websites.
Student-side: TPOT content located on Google Sites.
Tab: A navigational widget for switching between sets of documents.
Tasks Tab: The tab on the TPOT website that allows a user to create, post, view, update, and
delete tasks.
Team: Any collection of like-minded students working on the same project coordinated through
TPOT.
Team Activity: The various ways in which Google Sites can be used. May include visiting pages,
creating and editing pages, uploading files, sending messages, or creating tasks.
TPOT: Team Project Organizational Tool. Software being developed in response to a team
management problem posed at ODU.
User: A manager, member, or industry partner.
Virtual: Forms of interaction lacking physical manifestation which are mediated through
electronic communication.
Virtual Machine: A software-based emulation of a computer.
Virtual Team: A team dispersed through time and space which collaborates primarily
electronically.
Web-based: Software which may be accessed through a web browser and need not be
downloaded nor installed.
All definitions in the Glossary are taken from Wikipedia, Google, Old Dominion University,
Blackboard, WhatIs, Webopedia, or developed by Team Black specifically for use in TPOT.
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Bibliography
Ale Ebrahim, N., Ahmed, S., & Taha, Z. (2009). Virtual Teams: a Literature Review. Journal of
Basic Applied Sciences.
Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2013). Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in
the United States. Babson Suvey Research Group and Quaog Research Group, LLC.
Retrieved from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf
Departament of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. (n.d.). Retrieved from Old
Dominion Univeristy: http://eng.odu.edu/enma/directory/ppazos.shtml
RW3 Culture Wizard. (2010). The Challenge of Working in Virtual Teams. New York: RW3
Culture Wizard. Retrieved from http://rw-3.com/VTSReportv7.pdf