Virtual Teaching Assistant
Project Development Team
John Bailey
Richard Fitzgerald
Adrian Junes
Paolo Querimit
Mike Graves
Greg Watson
Project Manager
Presenter/Interviewer
Interviewer
Multimedia Designer
Researcher
Researcher
Product Scope
The VTA or Virtual Teaching Assistant is a software
application that will aid teachers and students. It is
an automated web-based system that allows the user
to get the information needed without having to
contact the professor in person or via e-mail. It also
can save responses from the teacher into a database
and allow it to be searched by the rest of the class in
order to cut down on the workload of the teacher
What it does

It allows students better access to course information by providing a
better way in which to search through and view course material

It allows teachers to get more out of email since it can mail students
when important course events have occurred automatically

Teachers will not have to answer the same question over and over
since the VTA will save teacher responses to be viewed and searched
by others
What We are Not

We are not replacing the teacher, the teacher still
must prepare course material, we simply allow the
students to get more out of the material

We are not Lotus Learning space, the class will not
be taught directly over the web page, it will be there
to assist with the class
Product Goals

To have our application successfully work across multiple platforms, both
Unix and Windows NT which includes both the VTA server and the client

To have the VTA be supported across all Web browsers, making the
product more marketable since users can use it from anywhere

To make our client software package be supported on all operating
systems and make the program easily installed and simple to use

To make the VTA server system easy to setup, update and maintain,
thus decreasing the need for any extra administrator for the purchasing
party
General Approach

Managerial Approach
– The complete development team meets every two weeks to
discuss the project as a whole
– individual team members will meet with other members in
their group as needed to talk about individual aspects of the
product
– Inter employee communication will mostly rely on email to
deal with minor project issues
Working Approach

Work environment - Visual studio and MSDN will be installed at
work so being much of the work should be completed at the
office

Employee’s will have to show their progress at the meetings ,
thus decreasing the daily stress since constant supervision and
monitoring will not be be taking place
Business Goals

To market our product towards educational institutions

To come up with a competitive license Agreement, containing a
College , Department, and per individual class licensing option

To design are product with with new features and options not
found in competing software packages such as Lotus Notes
Learning Space
Contractual Aspects
Items Customers must supply for implementation


Dedicated Internet Connection to for VTA server
- At minimum a dedicated T1 connection
A server to run the VTA
– For a Windows NT based system at minimum 400 mhz
– For a Unix based system at minimum a Sun Ultra 5
 The need for the server is based upon the amount of
classes that the VTA will serve
Contractual Aspects

A web server needs to be running on the VTA server
– For Unix an Apache Web server
– For Windows NT and IIS Web server

A mail server is required to incorporate some of the features

A system administrator to maintain the server

(Not Required) A video camera and audio recorder to record class
lectures

(Not Required) Voice recognition software to translate lectures
– Artisoft Visual voice - price 7,000
Web Interface
Potential Problems

Key people have gaps between tasks waiting to be assigned
work to do

Having the regular English search engine be able to able to
handle sentence’s from the user with bad grammar structure