PSTAT Data Needs 2018-08-27 Meeting Notes

Date

 

Attendees

(tick) 
Leesa Beck (Unlicensed)(tick) 
(tick) 
Sang-Yun Oh
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Patrick Windmiller
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Archana Babu Rajendran(tick) 

Goals

  • Understand the needs of PSTAT for student data as it relates to the development of their TA Assignments application

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
5 minWelcomeDiana Antova
  • Greetings and salutations
20 minTA Assignments application overview and needsTeam
  • Proposal
  • Requested APIs
    • Students - Department Course Extract: for TAs to collect crash-lists (currently done manually)
    • Students - Students Academic Programs: for TA development and planning
    • Students - Student Photos: many of our TAs are graduate students, and we cannot remember their names. Photos would really help to identify who is who
    • Employees - Employee Map: list and contact instructors programmatically
  • Sang - Large number of TA assignments each quarter. About 140 sections, 70-0 students, when student schedule changes that puts a burden. 
  • Sang - Trying to use scripts to alleviate some of technical tedious work. Need student schedule for quarter, reported by students. Want to pull student schedule directly and use it for TA assignments.
  • Sang - schedule is important, grades are also important, of they have an A they can teach, sometimes if they have a B 
  • Sang - 3 mini departments and students can TA in their department. In some exceptions, if a student has taken a course from another department, they could TA. 
  • Leesa -how do they get course history and grades now? 
    • Have google form that asks them for requirements. Grades - asks someone to pull from STAR.
  • Leesa concerns 
    • Student schedule is OK to get, not a concern
    • We cannot share only students in their area (PSTAT) so we will have to work thru that
    • Concern with sharing students past educational experience, this is for employment purpose, and not for educational purpose. The student should have a way to OK the use of their educational data for employment purpose. Leesa suggests that they get concern from students. 
  • Sang - if they add a checkmark will that be sufficient?
  • Leesa - she wants to reach out to other campuses to see how they handle it. Leesa will get back to them.
  • Sang - they can add that to the form.
  • Steven - the data will be available in the future.
    • Employee map - not needed. This API maps PPS employee IDs to UCPath employee IDs.
    • Dept courses - does not have grades, returns all courses for a quarter. We don't want to see a shadow database created. 
    • Can use it for next quarter to get the student schedule for PSTAT department only
    • This is a very good usage to get the current schedule.
    • Grades will come in the future when we  have the new API
  • Majors - want to know how far along a student is in their major, when are they graduating, so they can be placed accordingly. To plan for TA development more effectively.
  • Leesa - this is not protected by FERPA and is OK to get
  • Sang - by looking at course history they can tell the program they are in.
  • Patrick - several listservs. they want to search thru the API to refresh their lists frequently. Faculty, students, TAs. for on-boarding and off-boarding as well. 
  • Steven - this is more in the campus identity team area. 
  • Patrick - that is what they are doing now. Working with Scott Gilbert now. They are using the department field in the ldap, Steven suggested using the affiliation field. ucsbaffiliation is the field. Multi-valued field. Students have student and umail affiliations. 
  • They need to get all students in PSTAT major, and their email addresses. Can be a future API that we provide. employees will have to come from campus identity. 
  • Students future schedule - they will need to return all courses and schedules to find an individual student's schedule. 
  • Leesa - what will happen to the data in the other end? 
  • Sang - will be importing it into a python script to search. 
  • Leesa - as a short-term solution is OK to use, but not a long term solution. Once the other API is available we will need to switch to it. 
  • Sang - it is OK to switch when the new API is available. 
  • Sang - he needs course time information. This comes with the dept courses API. 
  • Steven - will come with the curriculum API in the future. 
  • Steven - TA app, provisioning, de-provisioning applications - create individual accounts for each application. Can request the photos for the one that needs it.
  • Sang - photos - are needed for TA assignment. 
  • Leesa - photos are directory information in most campuses. In our campus we have not defined it yet as a directory information. For this purpose we can give access and Leesa will start he conversation to add photos to the list of directory fields.

 DecisionsDiana Antova

Leesa - approved the use of the dept courses api, majors api and photos API

Once we release the student schedule API, PSTAT will switch to it from the dept courses api.


Action items