CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2016 E1687 Instructor account creation over the web

E1687. Instructor Account Creation Over the Web

This page gives a detail of the final project of creating an instructor account over the web in Expertiza.

Introduction

Expertiza is a Ruby on Rails based open source project. The main motive of this project is to make learning more effective through peer review. This website is a result of combined effort of both students and faculty at NC State, and is used not just by this university but also in many other universities. The website allows students to form teams and work on various projects listed by the instructor and also suggest new topics that seem interesting, though they can opt not to work on them. It also makes it easy for the instructor to add a new topic to an assignment/project, create a new project and add students to it. The time spent by TAs and instructor is greatly reduced. The key feature is peer review, where the students can review the work of others and provide feedback. This helps in improving the existing work and also provides a new way to learn. There isn’t any restriction on the format of submission as it accepts any form of submission varying from URL to wiki pages, which isn’t a common feature in other websites.

Problem Statement

In Expertiza, user and instructor accounts are currently created by existing super administrators, instructors or TAs. For new users to access the system and experiment the features offered by Expertiza, a “demo-like” feature needs to implemented. The following are the set of requirements that needs to be catered with this feature:

1. Allow people to request instructor accounts over the web. This feature should also have security features such as Captchas to help avoid account creation by bots.
2. When a user account is created over the web, the super-admin should get e-mail regarding the same and also the user should be notified upon approval/denial (if denied, then reason should be specified).
3. Currently, Expertiza consists of a lot of entities that can be made publicly visible to all other users in the system. But, accounts created this way should not be able to see existing public features, until the super-admin manually gives them permission to view public courses, assignments, and questionnaires.
4. A user who creates an account over the web should be pointed to an instruction page and/or video on how to create an assignment and register students for it, etc.