About Teacher Assistant Web Application

The Teacher Assistant Application, is a web application that runs on IIS on Windows Server, and provides all the work flow and management of communication and engagement between Teaching Staff and their Students.

The application was designed to allow for incorporation or extending Student Types to Professionals in their fields taking courses.

The application requires a SQLServer DB. You can use a free SQLServer Express edition for demo purposes. It is also worth noting that the App, is a C# ASP.net MVC 5 Application, built with Entity Framework access to the Database.

What the application does, is to allow:

·Allow Teachers to Set work On Line.

·Allow Teachers to Grade work Submissions On Line.

·Allow Resubmissions Of issued work On Line.

·Allow Teachers to Provide feedback attached as notes to the Students On Line.

·Allow Teachers and Students to arrange via Calendar set times for Help Sessions with Student groups or Individual Students.

·Allow Students to Submit work On Line.

·Allow Students to view their submitted work On Line with attached help notes from Teachers in their Space.

·Allow Students to request Help Sessions to specific Teaching Staff.

·Allow Students to Login and Out, as well as Register from a link on the login page.

·Allow Teacher to confirm Help Sessions with Student or Student Group Rep.

·Allow users to change their passwords when logged in.

·Provide 2 On Line Classrooms

1Public Classroom: where any students join without booking, provided they are interested in what the Session is about.

2Private Classroom: Booked by Teacher, for Individual or Student Group Sessions with the Teacher.

·Provide Calendars for both Student/Teaching Staff. Calendars are used mostly by Teaching Staff to set dates of meetings and help sessions or class room booking schedules, while Students only request help by viewing Teaching Staff Calendar chosen by a Specific Teacher they want to interact with.

·Allow Administrative Duties of the Site, where a Teacher is deemed an Administrator by Default.

·Allow Registration of Users, and once registered Admin Staff, are informed, by email, and allocate the Students into their respective Courses and Roles (which are extendable but currently there are 6 roles allocated according to Course).

·Administrative duties are varied.

·Allow Login of Users into their specific space categorised by course.

3Admin can set themselves as Teaching Staff, of Courses

4Admin can set up new roles, and assign users roles and Courses. Extending functions of new Role needs programmatic intervention, as this needs area spaces for the role, and functions may be different for this new role created. Though this said, all roles already in existence fit all the requirements for any courses. So there is no need to actually create new roles.

5Admin can allocate Users who are deemed Students from email confirmations on registration to courses.

6Admin can simulate being a Student of any Course and sees what a particular course student views. Of course, this is generic as there is no individual student identity associated with this viewing. Which means, student specifics are hidden.

7Allow Admin to set up Course materials which can be any media like video, excel, word or any single document e.g. zipped file. These are termed Teaching Resources. They can be either paid for or free resources.

8Admin can allocate media, which are again single files of any type and associate this Media to a Shop as a Product, as well as manage the Product details. When the material uploaded is payable for, they become On Line Shop Inventory items which get placed into the Shop area.

9Allow logged in User to buy Media Items from the Shop, which is integrated with a Paypal payment system.

10Allow Admins to Set up Shop items from Media

11Allow Students to view their bought items from Shop, which are provided to them in their space when logged into the site. This is viewable through the Basket menu on the left of the screen.

12Allow Students to view Teaching Resources by subject provided as above in link form in their areas.

13Allow Admin to View submissions of Assignments by being able to download them in their space.

14Allow Teachers, who should be by default Admins to Assign grades to submitted work.

15Allow Teachers to Upload Assignments as files, and allocate them to individuals or Course Students generally by class and role as a group.

16Allow Teachers to add Student Help notes: to marked submitted work in electronic form, and inform the Student that their work has been marked and ready for them to collect from their individual spaces.

17Allows Teachers access reports in excel about the statistics of Student Performances.

18Allows Teachers to view Charts of various statistics collected from the database to generate reports of Student Performances. There are effectively 6 Graphs with different stats according to predefined criteria.

All these functions above are easily performed on the site by logging in on registration as a User. Depending on Roles of the logged in user, they will easily be able to perform by intuition any of the mentioned tasks, provided the task is specific to that role. The above functions are obtainable from the left menu.

Using the above notes, a user's journey starts by registration. After Registration, prior to being able to use their respective functions, a User is supposed to be allocated a Role, by an Admin user which is normally Teaching Staff, who is informed by email on a Student registering on the site.

The site works on Tablets, Mobiles, as Well as Desktop apps, but geared toward Desktop with bias. Menus are always on the left of the window being viewed, and can be expanded and contracted out of view by an menu icon: this is toggling it to show and hiding it respectively.

The easiest way to learn about the application, is read this document and try out the functions above on a test site, which can easily be setup, on a Windows OS, running IIS server and SQLServer database preferably MSSQLServer full version for production while testing only SQLExpress free version is enough.

The application comes with a default admin user:

username: administrator@martinlayooinc.co.uk

Password: ********

This is the default user/password pair which needs to be changed on logging into the app for the first time, for security reasons.