Online platform to enhance the collaboration between students and teachers, as well as between teachers.
https://github.com/Anniegavr/Gateway_App
Clone both repos and start GatewayApp along with Collab Buddy and Eureka Server
https://github.com/Anniegavr/Collab_Buddy_Mobile_Addition
The project I chose is Collab Buddy. It received the best feedback from my peers and from most of the people outside ISD that I talked to. Aside from this, I’m most interested in developing this project and I can envision it the best, as I, myself, would have been part of the target group if it existed before. The problem that the project tries to solve concerns a bigger group than the other projects, also presenting clearer revenue streams than the other two, who mostly solve local problems of the companies. In addition, I plan on working on a similar project for my Bachelor’s Degree thesis, so the idea I chose shall be easily understood and envisioned by the graders. Lastly, the other two projects were said to have a smaller scope than the minimum one required to pass a JTOM program, as per my peers’ opinions.
College is an important step in education that is destined to prepare students for actual career-related tasks. Homework is the first thing most students mention whenever asked about how they are doing. Oftentimes, students feel like they are failing both in their academic performance and personal life because they can’t manage the workload they are given. In response to their concerns, others tell them either that they need to organise themselves better, or that everyone has gone through the same hardships as them when they were in college, therefore they should simply keep going somehow.
The problem defined above focuses more on the overlapping deadlines of the student’s assignments. Therefore, this project aims to reduce the occurrences of the above-mentioned problem as much as possible, by developing a collaborative web space for teachers and students to interact, which shall keep track of the student's workload, skills, employment status, live progress on tasks, as well as to preserve a reasonable amount of free time students should always have, hence guiding teachers in course planning and assignment release. In order to achieve the aims of the project, the following goals are to be achieved:
- To research the right frameworks and programming languages for developing the application;
- To research the corner cases, use cases, and functionalities of the application;
- To develop an application (that could easily adapt to mobile view) to assist teachers in releasing assignments in accordance with the student's schedule, availability, and skills, as well as to enhance organization both for students and teachers, by recording progress on homework in real-time.
The application aims at universities, mainly, where the problem of too many assignments and students that are employed or have many extracuricular activities is present the most. The second target audience are IT companies that may collaborate with the universities, to obtain information about students that are interested and have skills in directions that these companies focus, so that they would know about potential employees in the future.
This platform’s developer - the student signing this report - is truly passionate about the purpose it shall serve; The platform’s developer has a wide range of skills that shall enable the project to happen; Little financial resources are needed;
As it is a digital tool, many users might not be familiar with using a computer, many might not have internet access or adapt to using it; As a tool like this hasn’t been developed before, the argumentation of the need to create it doesn’t have a strong base or history of success;
This platform shall bring the student-teacher collaboration to a better level, by allowing teachers to know more about their students’ skills and schedules; Students will have less hustle in their life and their mental health shall improve; also, students shall have more time to spend socialising and developing themselves through social engagement; Students shall no longer see the academic life as punishment, but rather as their social life and their opportunity to find answers to their questions about the world; Students shall have their initiative in social and academic activities returned;
Teachers may pose as critics of the platform’s aims, as well as the platform itself if they feel too restrained in their work by the tool; Students might be dishonest in the personal information they share on this platform, stating that they have more or fewer skills than they truly do, or lie about their employment status, in order to manipulate the platform and the teacher’s decisions in assigning homework;
The competitors that should be followed closely are Moodle and Google Classroom. At the same time, MS Teams as a platform that works with Outlook, chats, assignments, and planning poses as a visionary of assignment management. Slack and Asana are currently used by many students in project management, as well as task planning, so they are potential competitors, too. MS Teams’ Assignments and Calendar features make it a strong competitor to this project in terms of execution of the goal. A more detailed comparison between the presented platform and the leading competitors, as well as the challengers, is depicted in Figure 1.4.6 below. Jira has the task planning analog feature, whilst Confluence has the information sharing feature. Together, they would compose a second Moodle if used for academic purposes. Google Meet and Zoom are far-away competitors in the way they directed some of their efforts toward assisting teachers in online meeting planning and board sharing. The current project’s proposed management tool shall bring a new concept that the competitors seem to lack - allowing and rejecting assignments release, as well as student profiles, where everyone can see their skills. In addition, the application shall offer a time-tracking feature, where students shall record the time they spent on their tasks, given that teachers also divide assignments into estimated complexity-and-time tasks. All-in-1 is a powerful feature, which MS Teams and Google offer. Moodle also tends towards achieving this. Google and Microsoft have complex tools which can be used, not mimicked. So they can be also partners in this application’s development. Direct collaboration between students and teachers, in a very organized way, is a plus - this is Moodle’s and Google Classroom’s advantage over MS Teams (that uses chats mainly) in achieving a useful collaborative space for teachers and students to use.
- Documentation session
- Orientation session
- Design / UX / UI
- Backend
- Efficient Communication
- Frontend
- QA / Unit Testing
- Soft Skills
- Mobile
- Project Management / Agile
- DevOps
- IoT
- Public Speaking