Odyssey Application: CS Teaching Preferences

This application collects teaching preferences from CS faculty members and allows administrative users to view the collected teaching preferences. The application is available on the web at https://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/odyssey/teachPref/.

Data Storage

The information is kept in the database.cs database app_teachpref. Important tables are:

• course: Describes a particular CS course over a particular period of time.
• coursePreference: Gives the preference and other information submitted by a given faculty member for a particular course with respect to a particular form submission deadline.
• deadline: Specifies a deadline, the first term for which information submitted at that deadline will be used to plan, and the number of terms' information to collect.
• personDeadline: Specifies information relating to a given person with respect to a given deadline.
• personTerm: Specifies information relating to a given person for a given term with respect to a given deadline.
• teachingBalance: Specifies a person's teaching balance as of a specific date.

Faculty members have access only through the web interface. Administrative users responsible for teaching assignments will have admin access through the web interface, and may also have direct SQL access to the database. It is essential that such users fully understand the way the application uses the tables before they perform any updates.

Authorization

Authorization information for the web interface is contained in table app_teachpref.authorization. This table is updated by direct SQL access by the administrators.

-- IsaacMorland - 25 Jan 2007