Technology

The UW SLO system consists of four separate web applications:

• The SLO Encoder is what faculty use to encode the learning objective values for the courses they teach, as well as create any customized departmental learning objectives that they need.
• The SLO Reporter is a tool for viewing information in the database. It answers questions about the learning objective encodings of courses at the UW, and about the learning experiences of our students.
• MyLO, the SLO Student system, is in a very early stage of development. It will allow students to view their personal learning objective profile, view the encodings of courses they have taken, see how they are doing compared to possible future profiles, and to educate themselves about learning objectives.
• The SLO Admin System is a tool that a non-technical support person can use to perform basic system administration tasks.

The system architecture for all four applications is based on standard platform-independent Java Server Pages. The backend database is currently using Microsoft SQL Server, though it could easily be moved to any other SQL database system.

The SLO Encoder web application is designed to be used either by individual faculty members to encode their own courses, or for a designated Learning Objectives Liaison (LOL) to print paper encoding forms for the faculty members. The LOL can then enter the data from the forms into the system. The Encoder is also used for creation of any departmental learning objectives.

It is important to note that the SLO concept of a course is quite different from the UW mainframe student database's definition. Rather than encoding learning objectives for everything in the UW database that a student can register for, SLO works with the learning experience-instructor combination. Thus the SLO database contains every unique combination of curriculum, course number, section, and primary instructor. Thus lab and discussion sections are not included. A professor can encode different sections of the same course separately (i.e. an honors, or pre-major section of a given course can have quite different content than one for the general student body). Independent studies (i.e. non-course learning experiences) are encoded individually, per student. Course encodings are automatically carried over from quarter to quarter. Thus if the same professor teaches the same course in the future, it does not have to be re-encoded (though of course it can be).

	The course list view shows all encodable learning experiences for a given department. You can choose to show or hide the descriptions from the course catalog, and sort by course number or instructor name. From this screen you can generate printable course encoding forms, go to the encoding screen, or go to the Departmental Objectives view.
	The encoding screen is where you actually enter the numbers for each course. The running total, and category sub-totals are updated live on each keystroke. You can click on the name of any objective, category, or course to pop up a description in another window.
	The departmental learning objectives view is where faculty or LOLs can create their own customized learning objectives. You can add, delete, modify, or change the display order of the learning objectives in a given department.

The SLO Reporter is a read-only view of the data in the SLO database. It contains information about how courses have been encoded, and what courses students have taken. Rather than a query/results type of interface, it is designed for browsing through a hierarchy of reports. The college/department/curriculum hierarchy of the University is navigated with an interactive outline. In addition to the numbers, the data are also represented in a colorful line-chart form. The information can be viewed as dynamic HTML with collapsable reports; in a plain printer-friendly format; or exported as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

	The Course Report view allows you to examine learning objectives encodings for individual courses, and the average profile for encoded courses in any curriculum, department, or college. Separate reports for 100, 200, 300, and 400 level courses are available. Reports are sortable by name or learning objective values.
	The Student Reports view allows you to examine learning objectives profiles for different groups of students. You can look at the average values for all students in a major, or for all students in all majors in a given department or college. Reports are broken down by class standing (freshman through senior).

Some researchers will need access to the underlying learning objectives data to design their own queries. For them, we will be making the data available through the UW Student Data Warehouse.

The SLO Student System is called MyLO, for "My Learning Objectives", and when released will be an adjunct to MyUW. Since there will be no requirement for students to use the system, we are making it cool, flashy, and engaging, in order to draw them in. To that end, MyLO will make heavy (but tasteful) use of Macromedia Flash technology. There is a proof-of-concept demo version available.

The initial prototype has four sections. First, an About tab, which contains an interactive multimedia presentation designed to educate students about learning objectives and explain why they would want to use them. The Profile tab displays their personal learning objectives profile. The History tab shows the encodings of the individual courses that a student has taken at the UW. Finally, the Progress tab allows the student to compare their own current learning objectives profile with various model profiles.

In a parallel effort, learning objectives encodings will be made visible in the already existing course search/registration tools at the UW. This will give students a very convenient at-a-glance description of what kinds of work they should expect to do in a given course.

A few of the ideas on the table for future enhancements to MyLO include various graphical/animated/musical representations of the students’ learning objectives numbers (with the ability for students to contribute their own representations as parameterized Flash movies), letting students export their learning objectives profiles so that others (such as potential employers) can view them, and searching for courses based on learning objectives values. 

The fourth component of the UW Student Learning Objectives System is the administrative application. It provides access to several of the most important database tables in a simple to use web interface. Through it, a non-technical system administrator can add/remove users (the departmental Learning Objective Liaisons) and define the university wide learning objectives.

Architecture

Overview

The UW Student Learning Objectives System is written in Java and Java Server Pages (JSP), and is designed to be portable to any standard Java application server (specifically Java 2 Enterprise Edition, or J2EE). Currently it is running on a Caucho Resin J2EE server. SLO has its own backend database, which currently runs on Microsoft SQL Server. In addition to its own information about learning objectives, the SLO database needs to know about all the departments and courses at the University; who is teaching those courses; and what students are taking them. Thus, another important component of the system is a set of SQL programs which are run daily to import UW student and course data from the campus mainframe into SQL Server, then massage it into a form usable by SLO.

Internally, the application uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, meaning there are distinct code modules for the application specific business logic (the model), the user-interface generating code (the view), and overall flow control (the controller). The database access code is also separated out, so all the SQL code is kept in a pluggable unit. Thus if the backend database needs to be replaced, all the code changes are to a single isolated Java class.

User authentication is handled by the UW Web Authentication Service, however the SLO application can also be configured to manage user passwords itself.