SVMS

The Scaleable Viva Management System (SVMS) is a web application designed to faciliate scalable viva voce oral micro-assessments.

Functionality

Version 1.0.0

Import Student Data

Files are placed in a specified location, as per config.py, and a separate script to the Flask server, AddStudentAccountsFromSpreadSheetRunFile.py, is executed on the spreadsheet. In this script, the following functionality is executed:

• The file is imported to the ImportStudentData class from the file StudentWhitelistDataImportHelper.py, held within a pandas dataframe.
• The current whitelist of students is obtained.
• Students who are already within the whitelist are cut from the whitelist
• Students who are not in the whitelist are then added to the whitelist, and an account is created.

Version 1.1.0

Import Student Data

Files are uploaded through a page in the admin section of the web application. The new_file_upload method is called from AdminFileUploadHelper.py. This method has the following functionality:

• The file is imported to the ImportStudentData class from the file StudentWhitelistDataImportHelper.py, held within a pandas dataframe.
• The current whitelist of students is obtained.
• Students who are already within the whitelist are cut from the whitelist
• Students who are not in the whitelist are then added to the whitelist, and an account is created.
• Students who were already in the whitelist and have changed tutorials are then unallocated from their group and moved to their new tutorial. It should be noted that students are not assigned to a new group, as this is a manual process.

Development Installation

Development of the SVMS Server is only currently tested on the Windows operating system.

Windows

In order to install and initialise a development environment for the SVMS server, the below procedure can be followed:

• Clone the git repository
• Install PostgreSQL
• Create an empty database called svms
• Create a custom PostgreSQL user
• Install the latest version of the ODBC drivers
• Duplicate config.sample.py and rename to config.py and populate.
• Set the ODBC_DRIVER field to PostgreSQL Unicode

Citation

If you have used our application for research purposes, please consider citing:

C. Paardekooper, J. Flynn, A. Kirkland, D. Cuskelly, A. Gregg, Facilitating Scalable Vivas through Purpose-Built Software, in The 33rd Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE 2022)