demos

An on-going issue in higher education is how to measure the value of the education received by a student.  This is called longitudinal assessment. For the institution, longitudinal assessment has two major purposes:  to assist in the process of accreditation; and to collect information which can be used in curriculum enhancement.

The process currently in place at Cal Poly is a paper process: paper questionnaires are mailed out to alumni; the responses are manually entered into different types of files; and finally the files are browsed to collect and analyze data. Our project automates this process, enabling response collection via the Web, and will also add new high-tech functionalities. The users of this project are intelligent but naïve users; they want a useful but not demanding tool. We chose to use an object-oriented approach, and to implement the project using an ODBMS (Object-oriented Database Management System). The users supplied the host machine, a Windows NT PentiumII dual-processor machine with 6GB of disk space and 128 MB RAM. The NT Server runs Microsoft IIS (web server software) and Versant's Object-Oriented Database Management System as the back-end data storage and management unit. The interface is from the Cal Poly College of Engineering (CENG) Web site, which is accessible via any current secure web browser, such as Netscape 3.0 or higher, or Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher. A subset of the proposed tools have been implemented.