____________________________Creating
and Using Web Interactive Databases
Administrative Example--updating and
editing course listings
The task
Students, faculty, and staff are constantly trying to
locate classes, classrooms used, and faculty.
Also, the information changes frequently, especially
early in the semester.
SAU's registration software, Poise, is not yet
Web-enabled.
So, this solution was a department-level solution and it
was also seen as an on-line community building exercise
because the database was set up so that all of the
department's faculty and staff could edit it.
The databases
Each database was created in about an hour or less from
the Poise printouts.
(notice that the student database and the faculty
databases are running on different ports of the same IP
number on the same server)
The Spring 2000 database is password-protected, but the
tentative Summer and Fall databases are not yet so
protected.
How they are used
The department secretary does most of the updating, but
faculty occasionally do so too.
Individual faculty search and sort the database from
time to time for various reasons.
For instance, I was able to determine that a
colleague was available (3/3/2000) to give a test while I
attended this conference prior to asking him.
Students, faculty, and staff search the tentative Summer
and Fall schedules and report errors, inconsistencies, and
deficiencies to the department chair.
Only a few faculty and students use this database at
this point.
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