Weekly Meeting with Dawn, 31 March, 2009

• I suggested it would be useful to get opinions from current users of the system
• Dawn suggests Shaz, admin for Software Eng: http://www.softeng.uwaterloo.ca/Administration/people.htm

Meeting with Frank Tompa, 1 April 2009

• Frank Tompa showed the process currently used for processing student evaluations.
  • run on fe02-solaris.cs command findall
• Evaluations arrive in the form of a report for a single instructor/course (not section).
  • "Characteristics of the Instructor": 8 questions. "Characteristics of the course": 7 questions. Statistical: two questions (# of respondants, response rate).
  • Very different styles than Eng questions.
  • Formatting is free-form, requiring lots of parsing.
• Frank's scripts process the class data into reports:
  • report for each teacher in summary form (with three years history?)
  • special report once/yr. to Faculty on all teachers
  • Tenure and Promotion reports per person- 5 year history
• Questions:
  • Does OFIS want to incorporate historical data?
  • Do we need to record section info? Not currently captured?
  • Does not currently capture "course #" because input data is wonky. changes formats every (few) years.
  • Can OFIS do anything with the course summary info in addition to teacher info?
  • What level of data does OFIS want to see? "Raw" or "post-processed"?
    • Frank can imagine handing over the processing task to CSCF at some point.

OFIS Notes from 1 April 2009

Met from 11am (while I was still meeting with F. Tompa) to 12:30.

Discussions:

• Email list: Marlon will add Daniel and Dawn
• GAP meeting discussion
• Report back on CS student evaluation process.
  • Yes, we need historical data for last 5 years at outset, if promotion report is 5y.
  • Marlon noted differences between ENGR and CS questions...
  • Daniel will ask Frank: What massaging is done by his scripts?
  • Where does data come from? [Daniel found out: From Dean's office]
• Report back on merit report (Math "Annual Activity Report")
  • Is our Merit period 3 years? How do we handle prior years? Just a printout of the previous year's report, we think.
  • Marlon marked up the blank activity report with questions.
    • Open q: what kind of question is Publications 4) "Software distribution"?
    • Ie, what do the filled-in fields look like? Daniel will ask Peter.
• Continued discussion on report output.
  • Does CS want output in RTF format? Not really. latex? Yes.
  • Can you automatically go from latex to RTF? Probably.
  • Can we have an output-independent intermediary for Math, and use latex as output? Probably.

Past Tasks:

• Is there a mailing list for OFIS dev / policy questions? <-- yes; dawn & dan sent link.
  • http://engmail.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/ofis
  • similarly: is there a policy document other than the code? <-- not really.
• Ask Peter: do publications appear on our records when they're submitted, accepted, or published? <-- Accepted
• Advise Peter whether we want a co-op for summer or fall. <-- not yet done.
• Ask Frank Tompa about formats of student evaluation input data. <-- above.

Upcoming Tasks:

• Daniel/Dawn: Advise Peter whether we want a co-op for summer or fall
• Daniel: Latex to RTF feasibility? [ http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html ]
• Daniel: Talk to Shaz in Software Engineering office.
• Daniel: Ask Frank about post-preprocessing data format
• Daniel: Ask Peter for a filled-in Annual Activity Report; and q. whether prior years' reports are handled by duplicating the prior reports. Also, hopefully, source of report in latex so we can see if a latex2rtf converter might work.
• Daniel: find some source data from Research Book.

-- DanielAllen - 06 Apr 2009