The syllabus project started out as Lisa's final project for Alex Milowski's XML Technologies class in the Spring of 2004. Dismayed by the general lack of standardization and usability among the various SIMS professors' syllabi (we shall not name names), Lisa designed a model and an application that would not only capture all essential information about a syllabus but also present various views of both a single class and combinations of classes. For instance, you could extract a view that would show you everything you had due in all your classes for a whole week. Lisa's final project submission can still be viewed here.

Observing all this during Lisa's in-class presentation of her project, Carolyn was very impressed by the ingenuity and utility of the project and asked Lisa if she'd be interested in continuing development together as the basis for their SIMS masters project.

One of our main goals in this project is to develop a fully functional, usable, and robust application in hopes that it can be deployed and used as a part of every day life at SIMS, in the spirit of eD. As such, we figured that we needed to start early. Lisa's existing code comprised a fairly functional prototype, but we decided to take a step back and rework our data model before moving forward with the application.

Under the guidance of Bob Glushko, we applied document engineering techniques to create a conceptual model of a syllabus, analyzing at least one syllabus from each SIMS faculty member along the way. We will use this model as a basis for fleshing out and improving our prototype application, and we will have it up and running in time for a serious round of testing by the beginning of fall semester.

We hope that both faculty and students will be able to assist us in an extensive round of testing during the fall semester. We hope to have as many of the SIMS class syllabi as possible entered into the application, and we hope that students will try out the application and give us feedback. Specifically:

FACULTY:

1. If possible, submit to us a copy of your syllabus for the fall as soon as you have a reasonably complete version available. Eventually we will have an attractive and intuitive user interface for syllabus creation, but in the meantime we will be encoding XML instances ourselves.

2. Put up a link on the class website directing students to the syllabus application. Maybe even verbally encourage them to try it out.

3. Submit changes to the syllabus as they arise, and/or encourage your TA to maintain the syllabus instance for the class.

STUDENTS:

1. If you are a TA for the fall 2004 semester and you'd like to help us by maintaining an XML instance of your syllabus, that would be fabulous.

EVERYONE:

1. Try out the application. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you hate. Don't hold back.
2. As you may have deduced from the austere appearance of this website, we are not really a design-oriented team (well, we design data, not interfaces). If anyone is interested in joining our project and helping to develop either the syllabus display capabilities or the syllabus input capabilities, or both, please send us an email or just track us down in South Hall.