ENVIRONMENT
The General Services Administration (GSA) National Capital Region
(NCR) of the Public Buildings Service (PBS) consists of one
main office and 67 field sites. The field sites are distributed
throughout the Washington DC metropolitan area. There are around
1,100 users at the main site and 1,000 users distributed among
the field sites.
CHALLENGE
GSA offers courses for federal employees in a program of continuing
education and training. Applicants used to register by e-mail,
fax, or mail. The U4P website was limited to static HTML pages
advertising the courses available. The few personnel handling
the U4P program were overwhelmed and needed to automate the
entire registration process online, as well as the administration
process for the applications submitted and the students enrolled.
GSA expressed the need for an application with web user
interface, and a database as a back end, whose purpose would
be an online registration and course management functionalities
for a continuous education process for federal employees.
SOLUTION
In 2000, responding to a request for services by the Director
of U4P at GSA, 3HT developed an online registration and management
web application built around a robust database back-end.
The process is broken into 4 key phases
Phase1: Publishing the class schedules
This entailed the ability to display on the web the schedules
for the class offerings, and provide access to that information,
so people know of the feature and can choose the class that
serves their needs.
Phase2: Enrolment on-line
A page was devised where an interested party can select a
course (or courses) & register for it. This functionality
included information from the Personnel db, to populate the
form with the personal information of the applicant.
Phase3: Evaluations via Questionnaires on-line
Questionnaires were created to gather statistical information
regarding the following issues:
i) Teacher evaluation
ii) Personnel skills assessment
iii) Overall class evaluation
Phase4: Generate some standard reports
Report generating functionality allows to consolidate the
statistics gathered while performing the operations in Phases
1 & 2 and the evaluations in Phase 3. Reports include:
teacher/class ratings, metrics of enrolment, skills and skills
distribution, etc…
The report generating functionality allows to monitor the
statistics, and display them in the format convenient for
the customers.
The application includes a separate Administrator module
with robust reporting capabilities to track employee information,
enrollment and attendance, and class availability
Functional Capabilities:
- Advertise courses offered, the schedules, and course
descriptions.
- Capability for users to register online Schedule conflict
handling
- Class overbooking handling
- Secure admin interface to:
- List employees registered
- Accept or decline registration
- Track student attendance
- Automatic email notification to students upon registration
acceptance
- Generate pertinent reports (statistics gathered,
teacher/class ratings, metrics of enrollment, skills
and skills distribution)
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