Design Goals for the Education Module
part of the Education Module
- Generality
ACS-EDU must be easily customizable to be used in different
university settings.
- Comprehensiveness
University will be able to use ACS-EDU as it's only education
information system. While this option is viable for new universities,
such as, aD University, existing universities will be reluctant to
scrap their existing education information systems and use only
ACS-EDU.
Therefore ACS-EDU will have an interface to the existing Registrar
database of users and classes. Main use of ACS-EDU in this case will be to
aid professors in course management, and aid students by providing them
easy access to the class information.
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Easy access to information
- minimal number of mouse clicks
- only presenting information relevant to user
- consistency
- emphasizing new content on the site
- generating email alerts when new content is posted on the site
- site-wide search
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Personalization
Portal pages are used to personalize the information presented to
students and professors. Users will be able to customize their portal
pages through web forms. In order to increase system usability,
default personalized portal page will be provided with the most
frequently used functionality (course calendar, assignments,
...). Provide portlets for accessing outside information (e.g. weather
report, stocks, email, news).
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Permissions
- Professors can control who can see and administer their course site
- Professors can control who gets to see and modify site content (assignments, handouts, bboard postings)
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Integration with the 3rd party tools
- Syncing of calendar and address-book with the Palm Pilot
- Integration with AIM
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Performance
The minimum performance requirement is that every page seen by students and
professors loads in less than 3 seconds on IE5.0 running on 500MHz machine or better.
caroline@arsdigita.com