Running head: Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Specification
Team Black
Jose Brandariz
CS411W
Janet Brunelle and Hill Price
04/14/2014
Version 2
1
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
2
Table of Contents
1.
2.
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 3
1.1
Purpose..................................................................................................................... 3
1.2
Scope ........................................................................................................................ 4
1.3
Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations ............................................................. 9
1.4
References ................................................................................................................ 9
1.5
Overview ................................................................................................................ 10
General Description....................................................................................................... 10
2.1
Prototype Architecture Description ....................................................................... 11
2.2
Prototype Functional Description .......................................................................... 11
2.3
External Interfaces ................................................................................................. 14
Figure 1. Current Process Flow: Assessment ......................................................................... 5
Figure 2. Improved Process Flow: Deliverable Assessment Feedback ................................. 6
Figure 3. Current Process Flow: Status Determination. ......................................................... 7
Figure 4. Improved Process Flow: Status Determination. ..................................................... 8
Figure 5. TPOT Prototype major components. .................................................................... 11
Table 1. Feature comparison between real world product and prototype. ........................... 13
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
1.
3
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 flawed process. Because instructors do not
have easy ways to communicate, storage of files with virtual teams and students, 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.
1.1 Purpose
TPOT is a project management tool designed to reduce the time consumed
managing teams. 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
access projects and team member activities rather than tediously going through each
site to complete the same simple operations. TPOT organizes the data of a project
in a way that it can be easily presented to instructors, making their work simpler.
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
4
1.2 Scope
The project was proposed by Dr. Pilar Pazos-Lago. She 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 (Pazos,
2013). 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-toface 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.
Team Project Organizational Tool, or TPOT, is the solution proposed to Dr.
Pazos. TPOT will be a web-based solution that will ease the problems experienced
by 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 searching for the
files and other information for each team, so he or she may focus on providing the
highest possible quality instruction. 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
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
5
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.
As can be seen on Figure 1, the assessment of deliverables is a sprawling
and tedious process. The instructor has to search through a variety of places to look
for them, from e-mails to team sites, and also look for who are the members’ of that
team to be able to give the feedback and grade to the proper students.
Figure 1. Current Process Flow: Assessment
(This space intentionally left blank.)
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
6
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 2.
Furthermore, providing feedback is added to the assessment to reduce the workload
for instructors.
Figure 2. Improved Process Flow: Deliverable Assessment Feedback
(This space intentionally left blank.)
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
As shown in Figure 3, 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 3. Current Process Flow: Status Determination.
(This space intentionally left blank.)
7
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
8
Similar to the assessment of deliverables, the status determination is reduced
to a visit to a single page on the Instructor Dashboard, as Figure 4 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 4. Improved Process Flow: Status Determination.
(This space intentionally left blank.)
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
9
1.3 Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations
Instructor Dashboard: A page at the front of the control panel for a website's
content management system.
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.
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.
Project Management Software: Software suites designed to organize the
collaborative efforts of a professional team.
TPOT: Team Project Organizational Tool. Software being developed in response to
a team management problem posed at ODU.
1.4 References
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
Brandariz, J. R. (2014). Lab 1 - TPOT Product Description.
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
10
Departament of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. (n.d.).
Retrieved from Old Dominion Univeristy:
http://eng.odu.edu/enma/directory/ppazos.shtml
Pazos, P. (2013). Personal interview. (T. Black, Interviewer)
RW3 Culture Wizard. (2010). The Challenge of Working in Virtual Teams. New
York: RW3 Culture Wizard. Retrieved from http://rw3.com/VTSReportv7.pdf
1.5 Overview
The product specification provides a detailed description of the architecture
of the TPOT prototype. It describes the diverse functional capabilities and how are
implemented using hardware, software and the different external components. This
specification also presents the goals of the prototype.
2.
General Description
TPOT is a web-based solution on which instructors can oversee projects done
by a team of students. The prototype has two parts. One is the Google sites for
students, customized via Google App Scripts to be able to collect all the data
necessary for an easy collaboration between professor and students. The other part is
the Instructor Dashboard, in which the instructor will see all the necessary data in
separate tabs, so he or she can quickly monitor the status of teams.
(This space intentionally left blank.)
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
11
2.1 Prototype Architecture Description
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 and the instructor
dashboard will be hosted on an ODU virtual machine server in the Computer
Science Department. A virtual environment will be generated in order to test TPOT,
using a wide array of operating system and browser combinations.
Figure 5. TPOT Prototype major components.
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
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
12
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 present 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.
(This space intentionally left blank.)
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
13
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 are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Feature comparison between real world product and prototype.
2.2 Prototype Functional Description
When students upload files or complete tasks, the Google App Scripts will upload
the data to the database so the Instructor Dashboard is up to date with the activity of
Lab 2 – TPOT Product Description
14
the students. The Instructor Dashboard will present the information from the Google
Sites to the instructor in a collection of Tabs. Each tab has a specific purpose.
The first tab is the Overview tab in which the instructor will see a summary
of the team activity and important notifications. The Files tab will give the access to
the instructor to the different files uploaded by the teams on their site. The
Messages tab provides the instructor with a system to communicate with students.
The Grade tab allow instructors to assess the deliverables of their students and
provide feedback with no need to search through all the files. The Task tab gives
instructors the information about all tasks assigned. The Activity tab displays the
student site activity and provides the instructor with necessary information for
accountability. Finally, the Admin tab lets instructors to manage their courses,
teams. The Admin tab gives the instructor the ability to create or delete those teams
or courses.
2.3 External Interfaces
The main interfaces used by TPOT are Google services. Teams Sites use Google
services with their Google App Scripts. This scripts can gather information to and from the
database to give the necessary information to students and instructors.
The Instructor Dashboard uses OAuth 2.0 API to verify a Google account used in a
third-party application. The instructor Dashboard also uses the Google API to pull the
information from the database and to modify Google sites where teams are being managed.