Notes
This project is aimed at creating a software component that will allow users to create "notes" and attach the notes to student records. The first use case is Online Registration, where there have been requests to provide a kind of digital "sticky note" capability.
Requirements
Notes from a meeting with Mary Callahan & Eamon Kearns to discuss requirements for new notes feature. 4pm, Tuesday September 18, 2012:
- Original request from faculty/advisors.
- Ability to add "notes" or "comments" to a student's registration record.
- Future plans would involve a broader scheme allowing notes to be
available in any arbitrary web application.
- For now, stick to Online Reg, with advisors and students being
the people who could interact with the notes.
- Advisors would be able to create notes for an advisee.
- Advisors would be able to view, modify, and delete notes that they
or another of the student's advisors had created.
- Students would be able to see their notes.
- Notes would not be term-specific, they would be associated with the
advisor(s) and the student.
- Primary association is with the advisor(s).
- History or change log of notes could be useful.
- Multiple notes for a student should be accomodated.
- A product called Evernote was mentioned as a possible technical solution.
- WYSIWYG editor for notes might be attractive.
- For the broader discussion of access rights to notes, faculty input
would be sought.
- The notes should not be considered part of the official educational record
of the student as covered by FERPA.
Next steps
- Build prototype - copy of Online Reg with notes capability.
Questions
- I'd like to understand more about the FERPA concern, about what aspects of
the design would keep the data out of or put it into the FERPA world.
Preliminary Data Model
A simple data model to be used in a prototype is here: Notes ERD
Some thoughts around the data model:
- The Notes entity contains a student identifier (pidm). This means that the whole notes feature is built to record notes concerning students, and not any other types of MIT person. Also means that a note is associated with one and only one student. A student, of course, could have zero or more notes.
- There is no direct association between a note and a person in any particular role (e.g. Advisor). The business rules around who can create and view notes should be implemented in code. This will give us the flexibility to use the notes feature in multiple applications, where the people creating and updating notes won't necessarily be an advisor - could be a department admin or instructor, for example.
- We will record who created the note and who last modified it.
- The Domain entity is intended to be the same as is used in the rules engine.
- It's not clear what the History entity will do - I think the intent is to track changes to notes.
Prototype/Demo
A simple prototype web app to be used as a demo now exists. The app is described here.